The globe's mightiest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, has embarked on what may in future be seen as a seminal marketing initiative.
The Cincinnati-headquartered giant this week announced plans to extend the offerings of its happy-housewifery website, Home Made Simple, to include music downloads at prices as low as 99 cents per five-song package.
The move is not seen as a profits-generator but as a site traffic driver with measurable spinoff for Home Made Simple's mix of home-care homilies and high-voltage product promotion.
The music download service, says Maurice Coffey, global associate marketing director for P&G Homecare, is not intended to make money. But glancing over his shoulder at the back-office beancounters, he hastily added: "What I hope is that I don't lose money on this."
The HMS site currently boasts 6 million registered subscribers and by the end of P&G's fiscal year in June 2007, Coffey hopes to have boosted that number to ten million.
Music downloading is a key component in reaching this goal. But Coffey also sees the new service as a move toward understanding how digital media can work for the HMS online loyalty program; likewise as a form of product integration with entertainment content.
P&G's new program is a joint venture with music download specialist PassAlong Networks.
thro' WARC