Procter & Gamble is redoubling efforts to tap into the emotions of consumers and the inventiveness of entrepreneurs as CEO Bob McDonald declares that he has brought the company through a rough patch and sees a brighter future.

The company has just launched a new front door for its vaunted open-innovation program, Connect + Develop. The new website aims to speed up and simplify external connections by linking would be innovators directly to top company needs, and P&G business leaders directly to external innovation submissions.

Connect + Develop, which the company describes as, "at the heart of how P&G innovates," has been responsible for a wide variety of game-changing innovations introduced by P&G over the last decade, ranging from Swiffer Dusters to Crest Whitestrips. The aim of the new site is to make the sorts of connections that lead to such innovations "easier and more effective," Laura Becker, general manager of Connect + Develop and of global business development for P&G, said in a press release. Continue reading...

Because it owned the house, it was predictable that Ford's new reality-TV show on NBC, Escape Routes, would find every angle to tout the automaker's new 2013 Ford Escape — the namesake inspiration for the show. And it did.

But what viewers of the first installment of the show might not have expected was to see a number of other blue-chip brands — including McDonald's, J.C. Penney, several Procter & Gamble marques, even Ford rival Volkswagen — go along for the ride.

The six-week Escape Routes series, which debuted on March 31st, is the latest way for Ford to push the envelope with new-era marketing formats, where it has demonstrated industry leadership.

And while the first installment was hardly Emmy-worthy appointment viewing, Ford executives tell brandchannel they're pleased with the social TV meets branded entertainment experiment.Continue reading...

Over the last 10 years or so, Procter & Gamble's Connect + Develop program has forged hundreds of relationships with outside vendors and inventors that have led to myriad big new products for the company — including the Crest SpinBrush, Swiffer Dusters and Olay Regenerist — have brought refinements and ingredients that weren't thought of or available internally, and have helped lead a surge in innovation at the Cincinnati-based giant.

Connect + Develop is still at it in a more challenging era, including looking for ways to out-license Procter & Gamble brands, products, processes and ideas as well as bringing still more interesting stuff from the outside in. And while archrival Unilever has been generating some buzz recently with news that it is setting up a new online platform as part of its own "open innovation" strategy, the head of P&G's longer-tenured operation believes Connect + Develop remains well in the lead among the company's competitive set.

"They got quite a bit of publicity, and that's cool," Jeff Weedman, P&G's vice president of global business development, told brandchannel. "I expect us to do well in an open marketplace."Continue reading...

If the path Procter & Gamble is pursuing in turning hard toward digital marketing is reminiscent of another recent, major strategic shift for the CPG giant, that's because company executives are deliberately borrowing from that model. More than a decade ago, P&G shook up the corporate world by opening up to outsiders for ideas for innovations in the products and features that make up its brands, in an initiative that came to be called Connect + Develop.

And now P&G is doing something similar for its digital-marketing push. "We want to leverage the knowledge and power of everyone we can" in accelerating investments in digital communications and marketing, Alex Tosolini, P&G's vice president of e-business, told brandchannel. Indeed, if members of the marketing and advertising community have "wonderful ideas" for digital plays, he said, "Please come to us and we'll be open to co-innovating with you."Continue reading...

Readers participating in the Consumerist blog’s second annual Worst Ad in America Awards have crowned Luvs “Poop! There It Is” as the 2011 winner, (above) taking 32% of the 115,000 votes and beating an AT&T spot at 23.98%, in which a wife berates her husband for signing the family up for unlimited texting. Check that out, plus this year's other Consumerist 'winners,' below.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...

The appearance by 11-year-old actress Bailee Madison on The Tonight Show last night was a virtuoso performance by a beguiling expert in product placement, someone able to make multiple brand mentions in seamless context and render them authentic because of her youth, innocence and charm. Or ... not.

In an interview with Jay Leno, the budding child actress and member of the ensemble cast of Just Go With It — where her scenes included the above one, set in a Pizza Hut — named a handful of brands that might have paid dearly for the privilege of being part of her narratives.Continue reading...

P&G is looking for a few good ideas. OK, more than a few good ideas — a lot. It's opening its industry-leading Connect + Develop innovation program to external collaboration in its biggest way ever.

The world’s #1 advertiser plans to increase its product innovation and marketing spend by 30% to develop products, internally and externally, whether brand new or tweaking  existing products, through its Connect + Develop initiative.

”We are interested in all types of high-quality, on-strategy business partners, from individual inventors or entrepreneurs to smaller companies and those listed in the Fortune 500 — even competitors," says CEO Bob McDonald in the video above.Continue reading...