Another event....

This time it is a CIPS Branch event for the Thames Valley area (go on - they are worth a try).  Sarah from Tickling the Trout is going to be covering the relationship triangle between marketing, procurement and agencies. I may be assisting her in a panel discussion.  Here is a link to it - it is on the 17th June - CIPS Branch event

An interesting Conference (in Florida!)

For once I have just seen a really interesting conference that the ANA in the US are organising this week, so too late to go.  It is their Advertising Financial Management Conference and it covers areas such as production, brand valuation, social media and the best title - 'Procurement: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly'.  Here is a link to it -  ANA Conference.

It has been many years since CIPS organised the annual Marketing Purchasing conference - perhaps it is time to resurrect it?  We are certainly slowing down the learning and education of marketing procurement in the UK.  There are no training courses as far as I am aware that exist at the moment. We were leading the way in Marketing Procurement but I fear we are losing that mantle. 

There is also a blog entry on the ANA site about the conference as well - ANA Blog.

Wish I had booked to go (oh and the location sounds ok as well !).

If you have some money...

Just seen that the CIPS 2010 Conference is now open for bookings, with an early bird special price of £200.

With me bemoaning about the behaviour at that local event I went to, the Annual Conference is usually very good with an interesting mix of both public and private people attending. John Timpson (key and shoe repair man) and Michael Portillo (MP - not sure where he was on the old expenses scandal front).

Here is the URL for it - if you would like to attend - http://www.cipsannualconference.com/

This last 2 weeks I have mainly been....

attending a breakfast, conference, a local women's forum and 1 CIPS Branch meeting (more of that later!). Bit of a long post here so bear with me.


I attended the Iris Procurement breakfast the week before last. There was a really good turnout and the topic was Payment By Results, with the panelists being from my old company - Orange and ISBA. The debate was lively with some good points being raised but I suggested that perhaps PBR is a bit dated. It has been around for many years and ISBA are about to publish their 4th study I think of their most recent study on PBR at clients. Don't get me wrong, I think it works well where there is a direct measure of the results of the work in place e.g. media savings, increase in sales, a well managed and objective client satisfaction survey. But I quite like some of these new fee models that newer agencies are talking about - areas like revenue share, getting paid xx pence for every new call to the new directory enquiries company. That is both investing in the marketing activity and if it works both the client and the agency get rewarded. I am aware of one agency that didn't charge a new client any fees but took a xx pence model and got a cheque for £1m. That is some incentive as long as the client pays up for course. Let's all try and be a bit braver on both sides and try and find a few areas where we can try a new model and see what the results are.

The ISBA Conference was interesting. There weren't that many purchasing folk there which I was surprised about. Conferences like this really help you understand the categories that we all work in and help you perhaps challenge and provoke debate with existing and may be new agencies on different ways of working to achieve efficiencies etc. Worth attending next year if the training budgets get reinstated. One comment to end on was the lack of women speakers - there was one. Come on Women in Marketing - let's see more of us next year (for once there was a queue at the men's loo not the ladies!)

Following on from the above theme - I am a cynic of all 'wimmin' things but attended a local 'Wimmins' Forum this week. It helped it was at a local chocolate making shop / school. All networking over a chocolate bon bon must be good. As most of my work comes from clients in London I rarely find this of interest but this one was really good. A very relaxed format, encouragement to speak to everyone there, no pressure to stand up and try and explain what you do (my Mother still thinks I buy pencils for a living !) and a genuine interest in what you do. I suggested a few high profile women speakers that live locally to them and hope to attend the next one which is entitled 'The Trials and Tribulations of a Women Entrepreneur' by HSBC - not sure of the HSBC connection.

And now onto my last event the local CIPS (Purchasing body) Branch event. Again I have only been to one before and that was fairly bad. Both in terms of content, attendees and lack of energy in the room. But as I chair the CIPS group on Marketing thought I would give it a good. The topic was of interest and a good speaker. Other attendees were mainly public sector and gave me a bit of up and down look as I was in 'casual advertising dress' e.g. jeans, shirt and my converses !. Everyone was polite but not that open to chatting to everyone, people kept themselves to themselves. But the main issue for me was afterwards with the speaker. Fair enough he had a product to sell - his training. But he then rang me up afterwards as I am sure that he contacted everyone and really kept going on about coming into see me and my company. I am sure that my two cats (Boston and Madsie) would be delighted to serve him tea and cakes if I am out at a client meeting. Mate - it is just me, and no I am not interested in training, no I am not interested in a meeting and no, no, no to everything else. It was a really hard sell and where in the small print did it say that he could contact me ? I have made my feelings known when they asked for feedback this week. So perhaps I won't get another invite but I just felt that the after sales activity as it were, was badly managed. That is my rant over with.

As usual, all comments welcome (and no blatant advertising as the comment was on my last blog post !).

Back to Skool

I have been sent an email by the Chartered Institute of Marketing - the subject heading was 'Marketing and Sales Standards'. Interesting I thought and I read on. Their vision is for a comprehensive and robust qualification structure for the marketing profession (like our CIPS?).



One of their 5 reasons for looking at this is address any skills gaps and this includes commercial/business awareness (good point as I think it is an area that Marketing could develop as long as it doesn't do procurement out of a job !).



But my thoughts were that I hear more and more agencies asking the procurement person if they are CIPS qualified and indeeed I think quite a few agencies have become associate members of CIPS to get the 'inside track' on us. I only know of one agency that has a procurement person and he is going through his CIPS qualification.



My point being that procurement are asked and perhaps judged on the industry qualification, what about Marketing ? Is CIM a current must for marketing people ? I know many excellent Marketing people and I bet that they are not CIM qualified. Are CIM trying to drive the qualification structure for the good of the marketing industry or for CIM ? All comments welcome and I have the link to the survey, if anyone would like it.



Interesting stats in the mailer

• The marketing profession, which includes marketing communications, is a significant professional group within the UK economy across all four nations


• It employs approximately 592,000 people, which represents around 1.9% of the UK’s workforce


• It is estimated that approximately 90% of the marketing workforce is employed in England, 6% in Scotland, 3% in Wales and 1% in Northern Ireland

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.