Dive Brief:

• Procter & Gamble (P&G) has released two short documentaries as part of its Queen Collective effort on Hulu, Ad Age reports. The announcement of Hulu exclusivity was made on April 26 at the Tribeca Film Festival by P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.
• The Queen Collective is a partnership between P&G, Tribeca Studios and actress-producer Queen Latifah to "accelerate gender & racial equality" by backing films made by women. The first two films are "Ballet After Dark" and "If There Is Light."
• The films will not be interrupted by traditional ads, but were created with P&G brands in mind. While they are exclusive to Hulu, P&G has promoted the films on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Dive Insight:

As a 600-pound gorilla in advertising, P&G's initiative to clean up the digital media ecosystem is helping to reshape the industry. With the release of the Queen Collective films, the CPG giant has taken another step toward using its heft to encourage online venues to act like publishers by making a new series of sponsored videos available only on Hulu instead of an open platform like YouTube or Facebook Watch, where brand safety is often an iffy proposition.

While P&G has been known to pull ads from digital platforms over brand safety concerns, Pritchard's drive to clean up digital ad inventory goes far beyond making sure the company's messages show up in safe surroundings. He has been very vocal in demanding a single, nationwide privacy policy that will supersede the patchwork of European and state laws that have now emerged, and he has repeatedly expressed impatience at the industry's progress toward cross-media ad measurement and ad verifications.

Along with privacy and measurement standardization, improving diverse portrayal of consumers was also one of the core principles of the plan Pritchard outlined at the ANA's annual Media Conference earlier this month. The female-focused films continue P&G's growing commitment to gender equality in both business operations and consumer-facing marketing. Along with the Queen Collective effort, P&G last year announced the Free the Bid initiative, which promotes female directors in advertising, and co-hosted the first #SheIsEqual Summit.

The branded films on Hulu are part of a larger shift at P&G, which continues to eliminate costs from the media supply chain, reinvesting savings into marketing and seeing sale growth. The company's organic sales rose 5% in Q3 2019, a period when it cut about $165 million in overhead including ad agency and production costs.