CINCINNATI: Procter & Gamble (P&G), the FMCG giant that has issued a series of warnings this year about the need to reform digital advertising, is ending its seven-year relationship with ad tech firm AudienceScience.

While P&G did not express dissatisfaction with AudienceScience, which worked with P&G on its Hawkeye programmatic digital-buying initiative, company spokeswoman Tressie Rose told Advertising Age that flexibility is key to P&G's digital strategy.

"There's a lot going on in this space. We decided it was time to add what's needed for local and regional flexibility," she said.

With P&G having taken the decision to give its regional and country marketers more flexibility over its programmatic buying operations, it is understood that Neustar will take over data management platform duties while The Trade Desk will be one of a number of new demand-side platform providers.

The contract with AudienceScience will expire on June 30, however the door has not fully closed on the company working with P&G at some point in the future.

In addition, P&G's initiative will not affect its relationships with its agencies, such as Omnicom's Hearts & Science and Dentsu Aegis Network's Carat in North America.

Commenting on the development, Tim Barnes, Chief Product Officer at AudienceScience, expressed disappointment at losing the business of the world's biggest advertiser, but took heart from the rapid growth of programmatic media-buying.

"P&G conducted a big experiment on the idea of productising an integrated solution that could revolutionise the way media is bought and sold and set a standard for things like fraud control. We've spent seven years building a solution that does exactly that," he said in an interview with AdExchanger.

"My anticipation is we will continue to speak with other companies especially in the large brand space that see value in the approach," he added.

"We would never share P&G strategy, data or intellectual property. That said, we have 250 publisher relationships globally where we are doing data collection."

Data sourced from Advertising Age, Ad Exchanger; additional content by WARC staff