Why procurement people won’t be in Cannes

As senior agency figures are signing off expenses for Cannes, a separate party for the Procurement Power List will be taking place. Dominic Mills is desperate for an invite.

You’re probably not losing a lot of sleep wondering if the procurement gang will edge their way into Cannes this year. After all, everybody else is these days…so why not them?

Me, I think they ought to go. They’d learn a lot from seeing great creative work, sitting in all those heavy chin-stroking sessions and the like. They can doze off in the halls as tech giants and strategic theorists pontificate away like the world is running out of pontification.

But the rest of the industry probably doesn’t want them there, even their client-side marketing colleagues.

They’d ask awkward questions, like who’s really paying for those glitzy beach parties – the ones where they’ll be standing awkwardly at the edge, shuffling their feet, hands in pockets – or the fact that agency X has flown in, say, Johnny Depp (private jet, natch) to talk about his wine collection and calculating how much that will add to the agency’s FTE day rates.

All these may be valid reasons why they won’t be there.

But the real reason is that they’ve got their own Cannes the week before. Well, sort of.

Actually it’s more like a mini Cannes in terms of scale, and as for the sun, sea, booze and exquisite dining…this is at London’s glamorous Tower Hotel, which resembles nothing so much as a bunker.

But no matter. That is where you will find marketing procurement’s finest, and loads and loads of them. If there was such a thing as a Procurement Power List, the delegates and speakers would be on it.

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Just looking at the speaker list alone, those on stage represent a few billion of marketing spend: Nissan, Coty, Mars, P&G, Mondelez, Diageo, Tesco, Vodafone, Heineken, Deutsche Telekom…they’re all there.

And just like Cannes, the conference is not cheap: a three-day pass costs £2,499 (minus early-bird discount) or £3,799 if you’re a supplier (no discount – funny that).

The same stratospheric pricing applies, I am told, to sponsorship, where the top-whack package costs £15,000. You can see those who’ve already signed up here, several of whom provide production services, of which the Publicis-owned Prodigious is one.

(If I was one of the sponsors – just for fun, you understand – I’d put my own top procurement people onto this gig in order to make the conference organiser’s life hell and to squeeze every drop of value out of my deal.)

Joking aside, it’s worth taking a look at the agenda to get a sense of where procurement people see tomorrow’s pressure points and big issues.

You can see the three days here, here and here.

Just as the confluence of trends means it’s never been more interesting to be in marketing, so the same reads across into procurement.

There’s plenty of the stuff you’d expect on the agenda, such as:

– Media contracts
– Transparency and trust (with lucky old Nick Baughan of Maxus waving the flag for agencies on that panel)
– Remuneration models
– Pitching
– More stuff on contracts
– Lots of stuff on digital complexity, which I imagine will cover some or all of the ground, including the opacity of the supply chain, highlighted by P&G’s Marc Pritchard last month
– Taking programmatic in-house.

And then there’s some stuff I wouldn’t have expected, such as:

– Taking innovation in-house (by which, I assume, they mean promoting direct dealings with tech start-ups, rather than having agencies do the mutual translating from the middle)
– Taking control of purchasing decisions with the likes of Google and Facebook. (Hmm. That sounds interesting, and a bit like a threat to agencies. I wish them luck with that.)
– And, and I paraphrase here, debating how procurement can – or should – take the lead on corporate social responsibility.

So you can see that this is no jolly, but serious stuff. You can imagine that senior agency figures – finance directors and the like – would gain a lot of insight, as well as the chance to contribute to the debate, if they were there.

But they’ll probably be too busy signing off expenses for Cannes.

Obviously I’m hoping for a press invitation myself, but if that fails to materialise, I may don a waiter’s outfit and serve drinks and dinner. That’ll give me a chance to eavesdrop on the gossip.

And I can be sure there’ll be plenty of that. Procurement people tend to know loads of, well, decent shit, and some of them are very entertaining about it too.