As anyone who spends two minutes on YouTube, Buzzfeed or I Can Has Cheeseburger? knows, you can't go wrong with pet videos. P&G's brand stewards at Iams were hardly surprised at the response they got when they asked consumers to select on Facebook their favorite heart-tugging true stories about pets' relationships with their owners, and then aired the winners as TV ads beginning today.

The Procter & Gamble brand, which falls under its P&G Pet Care division along with sister pet food brand Eukanuba, invited its Facebook fans, for the first time ever, to vote on five commercials based on true stories to choose the pair (one dog story, one cat story) that would air first by asking them to "like," "share" and "comment" on the stories that most moved them.

"At Iams, we trust our fans and value their opinions a great deal, so we wanted to give them an opportunity to participate in choosing our  next commercial," Iams brand general manager Ondrea Francy said in a press release about the new "Keep Love Strong" campaign.Continue reading...

Perpetually in search of brand innovation since 1883, when it introduced its first major brand, Ivory Soap, Procter & Gamble’s corporate commitment to innovating is articulated in the June issue of Harvard Business Review, where P&G is dubbed the "new growth factory."

The HBR article, "How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate" (co-authored by P&G CTO Bruce Brown and Innosight managing director Scott Anthony) looks at how digital platforms have filled the branded content hole created by the collapse of TV soap operas, a branding medium that P&G helped invent with Colgate-Palmolive and Lever Brothers.Continue reading...