Marketing Procurement

Former Johnson & Johnson VP announces launch of Illumino Partnership Consultancy

Illumino partnership will specialize in partnering and collaborating with marketing procurement globally across the entire ecosystem and supply base. Formed in January 2024 it is well placed to meet the demands placed on marketing procurement teams within a fast-paced, dynamic and constantly evolving marketplace.  

The formation of the company comes at an interesting time in the ongoing journey of the marketing procurement community overall as it continues its upward trajectory in becoming more strategic and longer-term in the value it delivers to organisations. Notable inroads in 2023 came in the form of improved transparency in key areas such as media contract compliance and auditing as well as the programmatic media supply chain.

With the help of organisations like ANA, WFA and ISBA marketing procurement professionals continue to report back on notable successes in stakeholder engagement at all levels, alignment in areas such as longer-term strategic partnerships with agencies and developing a more open dialogue around a concerted move away from the over-reliance on cost savings to a more targeted framework of value-based KPIs.

With a background in Agencies at Havas and Omnicom, Consulting at Accenture and client-side at Johnson & Johnson its Managing Partner Nick Sparey has over 30 years of experience within the industry from all sides of the spectrum. Illumino partnership’s core values reside in helping procurement teams adapt to pressures from cross-functional internal stakeholders to continuously deliver value and savings, as well as managing an increasingly complex and diverse supplier portfolio across the marketing spend.

“As the founder of the illumino partnership consultancy, my goal is to enable marketing procurement teams globally, regionally and locally to realize their strategic priorities with both internal stakeholders and the external agency supply base with solutions that drive innovation, added value and collaboration. I will help to provide the knowledge and experience gained from my years with global procurement at Johnson & Johnson to allow them to make better informed decisions across all categories of spend by championing fairness, trust and transparency.” 

“The roles and responsibilities for marketing procurement teams remain increasingly complex with a myriad of stakeholders to liaise with, sometimes conflicting internal business priorities to address and a fragmented supply base to help drive. The importance of robust category management and supplier relationship management cannot be understated in this respect. Both are critical to marketing procurement’s sustained and ongoing success, whilst improving the marketing-procurement relationship matrix is more relevant now than ever before with CPOs increasingly looking to further develop their strategic thought leadership in businesses.” 

“One of my main priorities will therefore be to partner at a senior level with all key functional leaders to help identify what is required to make marketing procurement a success in an organization. I know from experience that marketing procurement teams can sometimes struggle to make an impact in highly decentralized matrix organizations where stakeholders have conflicting goals and objectives. Our services within the business will therefore cover all aspects of the marketing procurement ecosystem such as stakeholder engagement, category strategy development and supplier relationship management, but will focus in particular on 3 core areas: people, process and performance.” 

Contact Nick Sparey via LinkedIn