P&G is certainly a marketing powerhouse. It just announced that it would raise its already record-setting global ad spending by another $700 million to total $9.3 billion by next summer. If ever there were a full-employment act for marketers, P&G would be its patron saint.

What's it got to tell the world that's so important?

Enter innovation. New products that address new needs, and old products that address old ones in new ways. P&G has been innovating since the early 20th century, like when its researchers set out to replace the flaky performance of laundry detergent and discovered synthetic surfactants. Named Tide, the company kept improving its formulation every year after introducing it in 1946, and invented a new social marketing medium -- "soap operas" on TV -- to promote it, wrapping its marketing with guilty-pleasure characters and weekly cliffhanger endings. The stuff was dumb. It made the Old Spice YouTube campaigns look like Kurosawa. Read more

Source: Advertising Age  By: Jonathan Salem Baskin