The Fifth P

At a dinner in Cannes last month, Mark Ritson did the maths on marketing's habit of inventing new Ps. What are the chances, he asked us, that some next newly discovered, genuinely critical aspect of marketing also happens to start with the letter P? One in twenty-six.

The table laughed. I laughed. It is a very good line, and like most very good lines it has a body count: purpose, people, process, packaging, positioning… every P that has been marched up the hill over the past forty years and quietly marched back down again.

The mix has four Ps. It has survived every attempt to give it a fifth.

Seven weeks ago I wrote a newsletter titled The First P, arguing that most CMO job descriptions have quietly collapsed into a one-P role (Promotion, dressed in the language of all four) and that we simply must all reclaim Product. In that piece I declared myself, in writing, an OG four-Ps marketer. I mocked the additions. I meant it.

So it is with some discomfort that I report what I have been unable to stop thinking about since that dinner: Ritson's odds were wrong. Not because there is a fifth P hiding in the alphabet. But because the thing now reshaping marketing isn't in the mix at all. It's underneath it.

The fifth P may be Platform. Others have tried Process. All of them are names for the same thing.

I prefer to call it Plumbing, the only name with the good manners to know its place.

Here's what sent me down this path. Last week, Digiday reported on how Unilever is actually running the creator programme its CEO announced to such fanfare in 2025. The numbers first: the programme has grown from 10,000 to 300,000 creators across the 190 countries where Unilever products are sold.

Leandro Barreto, CMO of Unilever's beauty and wellbeing group, described the operating principle: automate everything except the relationship. AI systems now handle creator discovery, vetting, brand-safety screening, briefing and document standardisation. Machines scan the internet for people already telling positive stories about Unilever products. As Barreto put it, "this doesn't need to be done by a person in an Excel."

Regular readers will remember I have history here. In May 2025, I wrote that Fernando Fernandez's all-in influencer bet was wrong and that shifting half the marketing budget into creators misdiagnosed a trust problem and diluted brand control. I stand by the strategic half of that argument. But I owe the record an update on the other half, because what Unilever has built since is precisely the thing I argued was missing: not more creators, but the orchestration layer to manage them. The volume bet remains debatable. The machine underneath it is the most instructive thing Unilever has done in years.

Because here is the reframe that matters: 300,000 creators is not a marketing strategy. It is an infrastructure problem. No human organisation can brief, vet, contract, approve and measure a network that size using people and spreadsheets. The average campaign that used four or five creators a few years ago now runs twenty-five to thirty. US influencer spend is heading towards $13.7 billion by 2027, on eMarketer's forecast. L'Oréal reportedly works with roughly 500,000 creators a year. Unilever deployed 50,000 for the World Cup alone. At that scale, the constraint is the plumbing.

And Unilever is not alone in laying pipe. Publicis has spent a reported $650 million buying creator platforms outright; Dentsu last week wired Meta's creator marketplace directly into its own operating system. The whole industry is digging up the road.

From the same Digiday reporting, Jennifer Quigley-Jones of PMG warns that automating the creator workflow drives content towards the safe and the unimaginative: creators learn that the fastest route through an automated approval system is strict adherence to the brief, so innovation gets flagged, delayed, reshot and eventually not attempted. The machine that manages 300,000 relationships may quietly homogenise all 300,000 of them.

I made a version of this argument myself a year ago about orchestration platforms generally: when every brand runs similar systems, configured similarly, optimised towards similar KPIs, the output converges. Commoditisation isn't a bug of marketing automation. It is the default outcome, unless something upstream of the platform is genuinely distinctive and you are managing for the risk of this drift. And Barreto himself hedged honestly, saying he doesn't yet trust the systems with the judgement calls, only the grunt work. The relationship, the creative choice, the taste: still human. For now.

So the counter-case is real: the plumbing can carry sameness at scale just as efficiently as it carries brilliance. Hold that thought. It doesn't weaken what follows. It defines who wins it.

Ritson is right. There is no fifth P, and there never will be, because the additions all fail the same test: they audition for a seat at the top table, and the top table seats exactly four. Product, Price, Place, Promotion. These are the four decisions.

But look again at what Unilever built, what Publicis spent a reported $650 million assembling, what Dentsu is renting from Meta. None of it is a decision. All of it is the machinery through which the four decisions get executed at a scale no human organisation can reach unaided. And here is the distinction the P-inflators keep missing: as the machinery grows more critical, it does not grow more senior. Criticality is not seniority. The plumbing in a hospital is life-or-death; nobody makes the plumber chief surgeon. Platform is not a fifth P seated alongside the others. It is the plumbing the four decisions flow through, in service of their balance. The four Ps tell you what. The plumbing increasingly determines whether. Whether the product story survives translation across 300,000 mouths, whether the price holds across a million shoppable storefronts, whether promotion at machine speed sounds like your brand or like everyone's.

And that produces the question I now think defines the CMO role for the next five years. Not "what is our creator strategy?" since every deck has one. The real question is: who owns the machinery our strategy runs through? Because whoever owns the platform effectively owns the executed version of all four Ps. If it's your client's platform, you are a supplier. If it's your agency's, you are a tenant. If it's Meta's, you are a guest.

The dinner-table maths was never one in twenty-six. The next critical thing in marketing doesn't start with a P because it will never sit at the table with the four decisions. It sits underneath them, humming, balancing, invisible in the way plumbing is always invisible: right up until the day it fails, or the day you discover someone else owns it.

So tell me honestly: who actually owns the platform your marketing runs through today marketing, IT, your agency, or nobody at all?

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 13 July 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.