Marketing Procurement

Maryl Adler explains how Procurement can drive innovation through partnership

Benchmarking

In my report, I strive to help agencies and brands see eye to eye on how costs are set and benchmarked and suggest new ways to determine how well a creative partner’s work has contributed to the growth of their brand

How is procurement usually viewed in your organization? Are you valued as a strategic asset, or just seen as a bean counter? Chances are, you’re treated as the latter, both by your wider team and the vendors that you hire. But as a former procurement professional myself, I understand the ambition felt by procurement teams everywhere: to drive impact and value beyond cost savings.

There’s been a great deal of thought, conversation and writing around how procurement teams can drive innovation throughout their organizations. That desire is a foundation to Project Spring, an initiative led by the World Federation of Advertisers featuring content from procurement managers in Fortune 500 companies on how they’ve built strategic value from the inside out. Inspired by the initiative, I began to tackle procurement’s potential to innovate from another angle: the relationships they build with their vendors and service partners.

The results of that effort are collected in a report that aims to help procurement and their partners arrive at a truer sense of shared partnership—one that’s better equipped to help them realize their strategic goals.

Assess What You Can Achieve Through Strategic Partnerships

In my career, I’ve operated on both sides of the aisle—the brand and the marketing services partner—and have built an understanding of what both value as they negotiate a contract and build new relationships. And while procurement’s role in setting payment terms and greenlighting an agency might be just an initial step in the brand-vendor relationship, it’s one that reverberates long after the ink has dried: affecting the likelihood of rework, of whether payments can be made on time and whether all business challenges are solved within the initial scope of the work.

What’s more, service partners can play an important role in helping brands achieve strategic goals and overcome complex challenges like the need for more diverse creative teams, more accessible product features and more efficient production. When the pandemic began, many brands had to hold onto their budgets and seek out new efficiencies. There’s also been renewed interest in CSR, with brands seeking partners that closely reflect their social values. Procurement is at the heart of those relationships, and teams need partners they can trust to help them achieve those goals.

Download Report ‘Striking the Balance – Uncover Value Beyond Cost Savings’

Understand that Marketing is an Investment

A key step in unlocking higher-value partnerships is to understand that marketing is an investment. Ideally, your partner won’t just create deliverables—they’ll find ways that you can work more efficiently and effectively, stretching the value of your dollar.

This does present challenges to procurement officers who are more inclined to treat marketing as a commodity, though. Marketing’s impact and ROI are certainly measurable, but not in the same way that your average procurement team would benchmark the cost of commodities. For example, digital assets can’t be compared like for like, and no two creative partners are truly comparable in quality of work. In my report, I strive to help agencies and brands see eye to eye on how costs are set and benchmarked and suggest new ways to determine how well a creative partner’s work has contributed to the growth of their brand.

Transparency is Key

Overall, agencies and production partners would do brands (and themselves) a favor by being more transparent to their clients, as transparency is the foundation for a strong partnership.

Many agencies treat cost like a black box, for example. But if agencies went beyond hourly rates and broke down how exactly cost is weighed against seniority and creativity levels of those who do the work, it would help brands make more informed decisions, provided they understand the value that each of these different roles bring to the table.

Ultimately, a partnership is built on compromise between both sides—and to do so effectively, brands and agencies must better understand one another and their goals. By building greater transparency into the negotiating process and understanding marketing as an investment that can substantially contribute to the growth of the brand, procurement teams have an opportunity to strategically drive value beyond cost savings for their organizations.

Download Report ‘Striking the Balance – Uncover Value Beyond Cost Savings’

About the author

Maryl Adler is VP Business Strategy at MediaMonks