B. Craig Owens
Analyst · Citi Investment.
Yes, let me talk first about sort of process that we used when we referenced that number and where we are against that spending. We literally, in our annual planning process, identified $100 million, some of which we allocated initially in the planning process and some of which we actually kept back in a fund to be allocated as we went through the year. And the use of all that $100 million was a combination of improving our brand-building activities, particularly against some of those brands, where we felt like we have not been sufficiently funding them, and increased innovation activity. We said at the time that, that amount would show up in all kinds of different parts of the P&L. Some of it is in freight spend actually because that's where we've spent slotting fees for new products. Some of it is in SG&A because it's helping to support some of the new product platform teams that we've put in place. Most of it, of course, is -- winds up on the P&L in marketing and R&D. That program, that $100 million program, is very much on track. In fact, we're spending maybe a little bit ahead of $100 million rate for the year. We're pretty encouraged by some of the results that we see from it, and we're sticking to our guns there. Now in the rest of the P&L, as we said in our guidance statement here, we're a little bit below our -- as we forecast the full year now, we're going to be below our original expectation in terms of marketing spend. We have -- we are benefiting, for example, in R&D, from the restructuring activity that we did toward the end of last year where we took out some resource and some spending that we thought wasn't giving us productive payback. So you've got ups and downs and puts and takes across the P&L. It's fair to say that the incrementality of this $100 million is not going to be as great as we originally thought it was. That was referencing back to my point that I made in the guidance statement, that marketing for the full year would be somewhat lower than our own expectation. But it's sort of the difference between the daily, weekly, monthly management of the P&L, our opportunity to find cost savings in various parts of the P&L, offsetting and being reallocated versus that $100 million program.