Gord Meyer, P&G Canada Household Care business unit director, heads up many of the award-winning brands that landed the CPG co in the Top Advertiser spot in this year’s CRC

Procter & Gamble's big year extends beyond Canadian borders; the global giant was even named Advertiser of the Year at the 2009 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Here at home, stand-out creative for brands that include Pringles, Cheer, Febreze, Gain and Pantene, primarily by Leo Burnett and Grey Canada, brought major kudos from Cannes, the Clios and the LIAAs, to name a few.
This year, P&G took cleaning products beyond cleaning, often espousing their other virtues. The Gain campaign focused on scent, with TV creative derived from consumer anecdotes. And animated print executions for Cheer Dark showed just how slimming black could be on someone who might tip the scales.
From Pantene's Rapunzel stunt, featuring long locks coming out of a window, to simple but powerful print work for Pringles and Febreze, there was no shortage of quality creative for this awards season.
"The overarching goal last year was to double down on the things that work. And recessions aren't excuses," says Gord Meyer, Canadian Household Care business unit director. "We continue to demonstrate that we can still be a company of brands - highly successful, growing consumer penetration - and our size is actually an asset in developing that."
We asked Meyer, a 35-year P&G veteran who heads up the majority of those brands, what makes P&G such a winner.

How do you work with other P&G marketing organizations around the world?
We have been refining our global collaborative processes considerably. The Canadian group that works on Febreze is plugged into global and regional groups, and it's almost like a virtual network. They'll look to areas where there's particularly strong development, and they'll ask those areas to lead commercialization ideas so others can reapply them.
And when you're taking that to a high level, what inevitably happens is that we have not only the ideas travelling but the talent travelling as well, so it turns into a virtual global team.

For the Gain campaign, where did the insight of focusing on scent come from?
These kinds of insights come from our segmentation. We know consumers value the experience not only of their laundry once done, but their laundry as they're doing it. We talk to people, and qualitatively, quantitatively go deep on [research].
Gain is a business that spans geographies, and our understanding of the experiential laundry consumer spans the globe. So when we mine this idea, we come up with the things that allow Gain to stand apart. It still needs to provide the cleaning that people expect, but [scent] used to be an "and" idea, and so it's from the deep consumer understanding that we are able to develop ways to differentiate it.
Frankly, it's the kind of business that inspires creatives as well, and that's why you see the award-winning creative that you do.

Are you doing anything interesting in social media?
This is an area we're very active in, but you're not going to see us doing large, one-shot things.
We're trying to find out how we can keep building these consumer relationships, and certainly social media by its very definition can be a relationship builder. But if you have a relationship with a consumer, it's a privilege. You don't use new techniques without feeling your way through and making sure that you don't break the bonds that earn you the privilege.
The Puffs [tissue] brand has done some great work. You'll see a lot of Puffs advertising on the Weather Network, and Facebook will send your friends get-well cards if they've declared they're sick. And when you look at those animated characters, it all works together.