There are certain national habits that resist explanation, even to the nation in question. The British soak their dishes before washing them. They just do.
This observation, delivered by Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, during his presentation at the Cannes Lions festival this week, was intended as a cautionary tale about the limits of artificial intelligence. It was also, in its way, a small defense of the unglamorous work that precedes any advertising campaign worth remembering.
Mr. Pritchard recounted how P&G had introduced Dawn Power Wash in the United States, where it found consumers happy to clean dishes as they went. The company then brought the product to Britain under the Fairy brand, expecting similar results. British consumers wanted no part of it. The product was fine. The assumption behind it was not.
Only after the team grasped the soaking ritual — a behavior that no algorithm had flagged — did the brand find its footing with a repositioned message: Skip the Soak. Sales recovered.
"AI could have analyzed millions of data points on cleaning habits," Mr. Pritchard said, "but it would not have understood the deep-seated cultural ritual of soaking dishes in the UK."
At a festival where artificial intelligence dominated nearly every conversation, Mr. Pritchard's presentation took a notably different tack. He was not rejecting the technology — P&G is using it extensively to accelerate production and multiply the content it distributes across channels. But he drew a distinction that much of the industry has been eager to blur: the tools can execute an idea with remarkable speed; they cannot tell you which idea is worth executing.
(One imagines the algorithm, confronted with British dishwashing data, concluding that the market simply needed more bubbles.)
Mr. Pritchard cited other examples where human observation preceded any technological assist. Secret deodorant's recent growth followed the insight that stress sweat smells worse than ordinary sweat. Tide Evo emerged after consumers kept describing the product as "magic." A Pantene concept about UV hair protection began during a retailer conversation about sunscreen.
The paradox, as Mr. Pritchard framed it, is that the explosion of content production may make original thinking more valuable, not less. When every brand can generate assets at scale, the advantage returns to whoever actually understands what people do and why they do it.
Much of the industry's current enthusiasm for AI has centered on efficiency — faster production, more versions, lower costs. Mr. Pritchard's presentation suggested those may be the secondary questions. The primary one remains the same as it has always been: Do you know something true about the people you are trying to reach?
The British, for their part, continue to soak their dishes. No one has yet programmed a machine to tell us why.
Original story published in The Drum: "P&G’s Marc Pritchard: AI couldn’t explain why Brits soak their dishes | The Drum"