To better engage consumers, P&G has also looked beyond its traditional agencies, like Leo Burnett, Wieden + Kennedy and Saatchi & Saatchi, to experts such as Leo Burnett's ARC Worldwide, Saatchi X and G2, for in-store, interactive, influencer marketing and design work. A new focus on the latter in the past few years can be seen in such celebrated launches as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, Autowash and Magic Reach, says Stengel, and of course, the popular Swiffer series, which revolutionized how people clean floors.

And the firm's working with more external partners that are "trusted by consumers," like the Pakistan Medical Association and the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia, where P&G runs a Pampers' Read Aloud program.

All of this has led to more innovation and creativity in marketing efforts. "Our consumer wants more engaging communications, and we worked with our communications planning agencies to discover new ways to reach our consumer," says Stengel. He points to the Canadian Cover Girl Outlast Lipstick campaign, for which The Media Company set up ads in the form of motion-sensitive mirrors in bars and restaurants across Toronto (the campaign won a Media Lion at Cannes last year), and the Red Zone After Hours effort for Old Spice, which included dance events in bars, an online contest, OOH and a televised competition. (Montreal-based NewAd was behind that initiative.) Other instances of innovation he cites include selling diapers through the Internet in Korea, a Head & Shoulders talent show in Latin America called Camino a la Fama, and the upcoming U.S.-based Pantene Beautiful Lengths program, which will donate hair to cancer patients.

On the topic of innovation, while Stengel has been impressed by the work of communication planning agencies to get with the times, he hopes to see more effort on this from traditional ad partners. He adds: "Bob Greenberg of [NYC interactive agency] R/GA [says] it's the idea of universal planning. It involves the development of new tools and processes that enable agencies to be, as Bob puts it, 'truly [about] engagement and to be...holistic problem solvers.'"

Specifically, Stengel is asking agencies to collaborate across agency/client boundaries, adopt a media-neutral approach, and become more flexible. So how does Canada, P&G's seventh-largest market, figure into all these changes? Strategy sat down with P&G Canada president Tim Penner to find out.

How has P&G's organizational restructuring impacted Canada?

We have clearly tried to tear down functional walls, and that's not just true of marketing, it's true across the board. As I tell the organization, business problems don't show up as one-function problems, they show up as multi-functional problems. So we really need multi-talented people on multi-functional teams working on many of the things we're trying to tackle. We have marketing people who are part of our sales team, and we have a variety of people involved in marketing relations to a greater extent than they used to be. What marketing is today is much different than it was even 10 years ago.