P&G Shifts Marketing Strategy to Social Media


Consumer products manufacturer Procter & Gamble Co. is said to be ending its 77-year run as a prominent sponsor and producer of soap operas — a genre the company helped create — in favor of producing more campaigns using social media.

The switch from soap operas to social media is one motivated by its success with previous social media campaigns — such as its Old Spice Guy YouTube promotion — and a desire to capitalize on the more readily available opportunities of reaching women through digital media.

Digital media has “become very integrated with how we operate, it’s become part of the way we do marketing,” marketing chief Marc Pritchard told the Associated Press. “It’s kind of the oldest form of marketing — word of mouth — with the newest form of technology.”

The company is an important advertiser that spends nearly $9 billion per year to advertise its products. The company is finding social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to be more effective channels for reaching women and has spent much of 2010 experimenting with campaigns in these arenas.

“We continue to advertise during daytime TV including soap operas as a way to reach consumers,” a company spokesperson tells Mashable. “In our marketing approach we build our brands based on the appropriate integrated holistic marketing campaign that reaches the consumer when and where they are receptive. As consumers spend more time online and via social media networks, our brands are naturally adding these options to their marketing plans as it helps them engage and serve consumers.”

The P&G business dates back to the mid 1800s when it began as a soap and candle-making company. The company started sponsoring radio programs — which became known as soap operas — in the 1930s when radio was emerging a popular medium. The brand continued to produce soap operas in the television era, including the now-defunct As the World Turns.

The Art of Maps: Map of Europe from Atlas sive Cosmographicae by Gerardus Mercator (1595)

Europe From Mercator 35 page

Atlas sive Cosmographicae by Gerardus Mercator (1595)

The Fleming Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) is rightfully regarded as the most important scientific cartographer of the Renaissance. With two contemporaries, the geographer Abraham Ortelius and the printer and publisher Christoffel Plantijn,he is considered the father of commercial cartography in the Netherlands.Even during his lifetime his maps, globes and atlases found their way all over the world.Mercator established his reputation mainly through his new projection method. The meridians and parallels are positioned at right angles to each other.If the distances between the meridians are equal, they progressively become larger between the parallels from the equator to the poles.This is why the latitude becomes wider the closer you get to one of the poles and why the part of the Earth in the upper latitudes exhibits excessive proportions.The advantage of this method was the far greater degree of certainty and accuracy in determining shipping routes.In 1585, Mercator published the first three parts of his own book of maps in one volume,which he called Atlas.The second edition appeared in 1589, with the addition of a fourth part. The first complete edition was compiled by his heirs in 1595 one year after his death.Walter Ghim,mayor of Duisburg the city where Mercator had lived for a long time,wrote the accompanying Mercator biography.It was the first time that a book of maps was referred to as an Atlas.Commercially speaking,however,the Atlas was not a success thanks to formidable competition from the Theatrum orbis terrarum by Abraham Ortelius,published in 1570,which by the end of the century had been reprinted more than twenty times.