Omnipresent consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble is diverting some of its US$6bn-plus annual marketing budget into branded content, with a Queen Latifah-fronted documentary in the works, and is seeking distribution partners.

Anna Saalfeld

vegeldaniel.com/Realscreen Summit

It’s difficult to get too far into your day without encountering a Procter & Gamble (P&G) product. Whether it’s your toothpaste, deodorant, shaving foam, razor, toilet paper, tampons, washing detergent, cleaning solutions, nappies… there’s a fair chance your house is crammed with gear from their myriad brands. It is in an estimated 99% of American households.

Ad Age estimates that P&G spent US$6.1bn on marketing for those products just in the US in 2025, but they, like many other brands, are realising modern audiences do not reward you for interrupting their viewing, you have to give them content they want to watch and work the brand into that. Enter Anna Saalfeld, 25 years with the company in a variety of roles but since 2022 head of P&G Studios where she leads a team curating a slate of long-form content and branded entertainment partnerships. You’ll see her exec producer credit on shows including CBS soap Beyond the Gates and Fox/Tubi doc Culture of Winning: Polynesian Football Pride.

“P&G Studios started several years back and it was born out of consumer insights,” Saalfeld told the recent RealScreen Summit in Miami. “As a consumer goods company we aim to really know our consumers. And what we were finding is that there was a very influential, powerful group of consumers that didn’t feel represented in the media that they saw and how brands were talking to them, and we were part of that.

“As part of that work we started an initiative called Widen The Screen and we’re able to create a pipeline of wonderful directors to create stories for our brands to be in and around. It really helped us solve a business issue and growth opportunity for us.”

The arm grew out of Marc Pritchard, chief marketing officer for the company, challenging his teams on how they would cope in a world without ads.

“What we were finding with consumers is they weren’t having a great experience with our brands as we were interrupting them,” Saalfeld adds. “They weren’t interesting. They didn’t offer value to them. So, was there a different way for consumers to engage with our brands? And that really gave rise to P&G Studios.”

P&G Studios isn’t a production company in the traditional sense – physically producing content – but it does engage with third party producers and partners and is then involved with the creative process. Saalfeld will take pitches for ideas and provide creative notes on projects in progress.

Loretha Jones

vegeldaniel.com/Realscreen Summit

One such partnership has been with Flavor Unit Entertainment, the prodco set up in the 1990s by Queen Latifah and Shakim Compere. Loretha Jones, the company’s head of content and a 35-year content business veteran, says: “Branded entertainment and the experience with consumers has evolved over the years.

“Apart from Super Bowl people don’t get excited about commercials. Nobody is saying ‘I can’t wait to see commercials’ except for Super Bowl, and even then it’s is it going to make me laugh? Is it going to entertain me? Is it going to be something that I want to talk about when I go back to work?

“And so for us the ‘why? has been how do we partner with P&G to reach our audience. They’re consumers, for us it’s an audience we seek to entertain and because of the kind of work that we do through our entertainment we also seek to lightly inform and do some of our advocacy work. This partnership has allowed us to do a broad range of that because P&G is about the business and reaching their clientele but they respect and understand that the best way to reach and hold that clientele is if they’re entertained. They’ve allowed us to bring entertaining stories to that audience.”

P&G Studios does business including film partnerships – nine different product link ups with Wicked for instance – custom content and long form stories, though the brands aren’t necessarily embedded in the content. “It’s about an authentic connection,” Saalfeld says.

On such example is GAPS, a short scripted story about a teenager who is torn between keeping her gapped front teeth or changing it for a ‘perfect smile’. The film was part of a set of short-form scripted and unscripted projects that emerged from a long-standing partnership between Queen Latifah and Mark Pritchard aiming to provide opportunities for diverse filmmakers.

“I know diversity is a bad word for some but from a business perspective diversity is imperative,” says Jones. “If you want to reach the widest possible audience, to sell anything, whether it’s tickets or products, you’ve got to have a diverse audience.”

The partnership produced more than a dozen films, mainly unscripted documentaries, of which GAPS was a very obvious fit for P&G’s Crest toothpaste brand. “It was a personal story for the filmmaker whose mum had been a dentist and she also wanted to tell a story that was culturally specific for her, because gaps were very prevalent in her community.

“Crest immediately came on board and we were able to shoot a story that is extremely emotional, personal and funny. We actually reached out to a couple of people who were on established television series like Abbott Elementary. There’s a character who has a very wide gap, and he agreed to be it because he also wanted to celebrate gaps. And so we made a piece that is funny, entertaining, heartwarming, and features Crest in a way that is organic, as opposed to feeling like a commercial.”

Saalfeld adds: “We know when our brands are in relevant, resonant content that consumers respond: purchase intent goes up significantly, recall goes up significantly. The context around where we put our brands and how our brands show up and how we engage with our consumers matters.”

In January P&G also made a move into the trendy microdrama space with 55×1.30 The Golden Pear Affair in partnership with microdrama platform Pixie USA and agency Dentsu.

But the next opportunity to work with them is another partnership with Flavor Unit Entertainment that saw cleaning product Febreze back the short form social media clips from a documentary called You Can Go Home Again about Latifah’s $14m housing project in New Jersey. The film is currently looking for distribution and Saalfeld is actively looking for partners in that regard.

“We’re exploring all options. It’s really beautiful as a long form piece and we are definitely exploring together so many different formats. We’re really trying to focus on being very consumer led and making sure we’re telling great stories,” she adds.

“It works best in distribution when we can all bring our superpowers to the table. How can we leverage our brands to help drive promotion behind the films? How can we collaborate together? How can we bring our creative and marketing muscles together to be able to get the content in front of the biggest audience?”