22 December 2009

Another article about Procurement

Last week's issue of Marketing Week (17 December 2009) has a fairly lengthy report on Procurement, entitled 'Keep your eyes on the price'.

It starts off with how Marketing often see Procurement as the enemy. But there is a balanced view from the people that were interviewed including Julie Constable who does some work with the MCCA, and I worked with at AAR a few years ago.

If anyone wants any more detail on the article, just drop me an email. I hesitate to waste my time typing up more press about us but maybe one day, there will be less articles on our role and more centred and written from the general acceptance of our role.

New Year's resolution perhaps - that we all aim to get the positive PR machine rolling in 2010 !

17 December 2009

Stars and Stripes

Back from my trip to New York New York!. I had a meeting with a global network agency to kick off a clients' 2010 fee negotiations and also met up with a TV Post Production company.

The scale of the clients spend in the US is absolutely massive - you are talking total COI spend multiplied a few times. I also get the impression (and forgive me if I am wrong) that as a market they are less developed in the way that they deal with procurement. The chaps at the TV Post Production company said that as the scale is so huge the agency heads are calling the shots, and in one agency that could be the Head of Account Management, Head of Creative and Head of TV - three Heads for one account. What chance do Procurement have?

But of course, there is the view of the agency - earlier this month, Ogilvy’s Head of Northern America, John Seifirt, in a memo to staff announcing 90 redundancies blamed client cost-cutting and the role of procurement departments for the structural changes being forced on agencies, including his own. No responsibility back on the agency then to cut their cloth in terms of economic hardship then!

09 December 2009

Let’s Play Ball!

I am just about to fly over the water and came across this blog by an agency in the US. They are called Mad 4 Marketing - what a great name. They have posted a blog following the infamous Ad Age article and the summary of it is "Let’s Play Ball!”. They agree with some comments that people have raised in this blog - "it’s an educational process. Business development people should be including procurement leaders in their outreach. As previously mentioned, 90% do not have marketing backgrounds and would benefit from being part of ongoing dialogue".

Click here for the whole blog. It is nice to see a positive and proactive view of the way forward.

P.S. not sure about the 90% stat!

07 December 2009

Is there a theme emerging ?

I did a talk tonight to the Pimento agencies. They are a network of individual and specialised agencies who run separately and also together under the Pimento umbrella - expertly managed by Stephen Knight and Isabelle Beauquin.

They were really interested in hearing about the role of client procurement and I got onto my favourite soapbox of the month, please support / accept and work with client procurement.

The main two issues that they raised (and I think that they have a point) is:
  • All too often in tender processes, procurement are faceless and you cannot interact with them (this was brought up at the Iris procurement breakfast as well)
  • Does an e auction work for marketing services ? (I like e-tendering as it reduces the amount of paper used in a RFP process but think it is very hard to use e -auctions for services - goods with a fixed specification - yes)

I know it is hard to talk to suppliers during any procurement process but in an area such as the one that we work in (marketing), as Bob Hoskins used to say in the old BT adverts "it is good to talk". Positive client - agency - procurement dialogue is productive when it works well.

04 December 2009

Is that a glimmer of hope I see?

In this week's issue of Supply Management (page 8), there may be some light at the end of the tunnel.

Ray Jones, who is head of communications at the Chartered Institute of Marketing said and I quote "the onus is on marketers to appreciate the value buyers can add to their projects. It is up to us to keep up to date with business and to be numerate enough to work closely with procurement to prove there is a good return on investment".

Sounds great. Now they just need to communicate that to their membership and all the marketeers in the UK maybe the world that have a block about engaging with their procurement teams. Here's hoping.

02 December 2009

Is this answer to the ' can we measure ROI' question?

Mike from CIPS has forwarded me this press release from the COI on how they are looking to put a common approach in place to calculate the financial effectiveness and efficiency of public sector marketing.

The paper shows that the 1998-2005 Teacher Recruitment campaign not only paid for itself; but should provide returns of another £85 for every £1 spent. While the Tobacco Control campaign, is estimated to have saved the economy £7.1bn; against an advertising spend of £49.3m between 1999-2004.

The paper proposes a series of universal definitions to ensure practitioners adopt the same terminology and outlines a 10-step process to help government communicators determine sensible and robust estimates of Payback - the absolute financial benefit delivered by marketing - and Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) - the number of pounds of Payback delivered, less the cost of the marketing - for every pound spent. It also provides six key principles that should underpin this.

Here is a link to the PDF on the COI website - click here.

First blog article revisited

There is an article on the Procurement Leaders website blog about that Ad Age article that I mentioned in my first blog and the influence of procurement, States side. Click here for the article.

What is interesting is that Jonah Bloom, the Editor of Advertising Age hits back and explains the rationale behind his view on the impact of procurement on agencies revenue.

The best quote in the article is 'The squeeze in fees that the advertising industry is experiencing is as a result of better communication between marketing and procurement, not worse'. I think that this is true as the relationship between marketing and procurement is constantly improving.

The sector that I see that 'gets' procurement is Media. I am often asked to do training for the media agencies and support on key tenders. As buyers themselves, I think that they get it and understand and appreciate their role in a tender/pitch situation. The sector that really doesn't get procurement is Design. They really struggle to see how Procurement can put a value on creativity. My advice to any design agency that approaches me - is to help then, help educate the value of your output and work with procurement to get a solution in place that all three parties (including the Brand / Design person) are happy with.