Procurement, eh… never there when you want them

It’s time procurement departments bothered to see what media agencies can really – and brilliantly – do, writes Dominic Mills.

I suppose it is in the nature of a job that doesn’t allow them to get out and about much, but procurement people always seem to be around when you don’t want or need them, and never there when they might learn something.

Yes, they can be glimpsed away from their spreadsheets from time to time – last month I bumped into a couple I know at events on programmatic trading and ad blocking – but not often enough.

Take last week, for example, at a Thinkbox seminar on response-driven media, specifically looking at the interplay between online and offline, the optimum relationships between the two, and how to look at the medium- and longer-term brand effects.

Ok, you go, that’s a heavy subject (indeed it was – attendees were given Red Bull in case their attention lagged) – and not, strictly speaking, of much interest to anyone in procurement.

But it is clearly of interest to others: the event was a sell-out and, amongst a planner-centric audience, there were many clients.

Those in the room saw a presentation from Jane Christian and David Beale of MediaCom. It joined all the media touchpoints, looked at reach and frequency, spend, by sector, and immediate, intermediate and longer-term brand effects.

Source: Thinkbox

It was complex, massively time-consuming to do, and full of insight.

For any client with an interest in response-driven advertising – and who isn’t these days? – this was gold-dust.

The chart above gives you some idea of just how much work and brainpower was applied.

The details of the presentation are for another time, but the point is that it reminded me exactly of what media agencies are for, and at their best, do brilliantly: to go way, way, beyond the buying and to provide value-added research and insight.

Yes, it was MediaCom, the big daddy of them, up on the stage, but most of its peers are equally as capable.

In the current climate, media agencies have had a giant target pinned to their back. Everybody is taking potshots at them. But too often the industry (columnists and journalists too) forget the contribution media agencies can make.

And that is why procurement needs to get out a bit more: every time they apply the thumbscrews of cost-per-hour and FTE to an agency supplier, or measure media agencies on their ability to buy cheap, they risk driving out agencies’ ability to do work like this, and narrow their remit such that their ability to make a real, business-related, impact is minimised.
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Yes, I agree that agencies may be partly to blame for chucking in value-added services for free, and then for seeking to ‘fund’ them on the blindside.

The model is flawed, if not broken. We all know that.

Fixing it requires a fresh start. One way to initiate that process is to let procurement see what agencies can really do. I’m sure some procurement people will argue that, based on extensive cost-benefit analysis, they don’t have the time to do this.

But they need to make the time.

Cadbury’s corrosive corporate language

So Cadbury’s – bastards! – have decided to fiddle with our Fruit and Nut bars by adding sultanas to the list of ingredients.

Mail Online says this is inevitable when a beloved British brand is owned by a company that makes rubber cheese. Quite so.

I see the dead hand of cost cutting in there. Here’s chief executive Irene Rosenfeld doing her best to disguise what’s really going on in a statement that accompanied Mondelez’s latest quarterly results two weeks ago.

(By the way, revenue fell for the eighth straight quarter, especially in Europe where they were down 32pc. My heart bleeds.)

She said: “We delivered strong margin expansion…by progressing our transformation agenda. We’re continuing to aggressively reduce costs to expand margins and provide the fuel for incremental investments behind our Power Brands [including Milka and Cadbury’s]…and route-to-market capabilities.”

Hmm, as it makes me weep inside, it also explains the sultana decision. But how it affects ‘route-to-market’ capabilities…well, I have no idea, and I don’t even know what it really means anyway.

This is corporate language at its corrosive worst and, if it hasn’t already, it will infect and brutalise the entire organisation. In hierarchies, everyone takes their lead from the top. As the leader speaks, so does everyone down the corporate ladder.

This includes the marketing teams, the last place it should reach. Cadbury’s (Mondelez, if we must) is nothing if it is not a marketing organisation, and the core of marketing is clarity and simplicity of message, not Orwellian-style mangling and obfuscation.

And so from the marketing department, this language is transferred to Cadbury’s agencies via the briefs they receive. I feel sorry for them, and I bet the results show. Ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw a decent Cadbury’s ad?