ProcureCon Marketing

By George Porteous

In June, AAR’s Chief Strategy Officer George Porteous attended the ProcureCon Marketing event addressing the latest hot topics in marketing procurement. He also joined a panel debate during the conference to discuss client/ agency relationships with Xavier Rees from Havas and Lisa Kirkbright from Skoda.

Overall, three themes about marketing procurement stood out that may be of interest for agency leaders who are targeting this audience:

1. Procurement teams are still pushing to define their contribution in terms of value creation, not cost reduction;

2. They believe they can play a key role in bringing fairness and transparency to agency selection and relationship management;

3. They can also help bring commercial and operational rigour to marketing, which can boost the credibility of marketing in the organisation, if a constructive relationship can be built between marketing and procurement.

And more broadly, debates at the event reflected wider trends we are seeing in the marketing industry:

• The focus on delivering data-driven marketing and the related challenge of managing the complexity of the various technologies and building the right internal and external capabilities to enable this.

• The desire to have relationships with agencies that are real partnerships based around strategic value not just commoditised services at low cost.

• The urgent need to tell a compelling story about the role and value of marketing at board level and across the organisation, and the importance of engagement and taking the company with you on a change journey to evolve marketing capabilities. ●