Why I’d fire P&G’s CEO, get a marketing clue dude.

I’m all for taking ownership of mistakes and humility for our infallibility in all things pertaining to life, whether it’s personal or professional. But there are some things that just seem inexcusable to me. When it comes to marketing, that pet peeve is making insanely non-cost effective marketing decisions in world where the ROI of tactics is relatively easy to understand.

In an article on Business Insider discussing P&G’s plan to lay off 1600 workers, it seems to me that the primary character in the article, P&G’s clueless CEO, might be a better lay off than the 1600, far less compensated employees.

In the article it discusses the *extreme sarcasm* revolutionary realization that P&G’s CEO made regarding traditional ad spends, and P&G’s insane multi-billion dollar ad budget. The earth-shattering conclusion that their CEO came to, which moved him to layoff a bloated staff, was … you might wanna sit down for this and call in your marketing team because I’m sure this all going to be news to them, it really is the biggest thing to happen to marketing since the printing press . . the P&G CEO’s big discovery was:

It’s cheaper and more impactful to advertise on search and social.

I’ll give you a minute to let that sit in because I’m aware of how earth shattering it is.

Now don’t get me wrong, I make no assumption of understanding the full scope of responsibilities that rest on a top executive’s shoulders and P&G’s clearly executes those other responsibilities correctly. But the ROI of marketing from traditional tactics to emerging tactics is NOTHING NEW! A prudent, innovative and inquisitive executive owes it to their employees, their board and their shareholders to be fully briefed on the acquisition cost for sales and customers. Being that clueless is inexcusable, all he’d need to do is subscribe to a couple marketing blogs and he’d fully understand it all.

Instead, this clueless exec cost 1600 employees their jobs, while he’ll collect massive bonuses and place a bandage on the marketing wound he helped create in which P&G hemorrhaged billions of dollars.

All of this for his groundbreaking discovery that: online and mobile tactics are cheaper and carry more impact. In other news, the sky is still blue and water is wet.

Check out the Business Insider article.