Marketing Procurement Trends from Procurecon Marketing 2018

Flock attended Procurecon, the Marketing Procurement Conference in London last week. We attended plenary sessions, had over thirty meetings with Marketing Procurement leaders, numerous informal conversations with suppliers, and hosted a sold out Agency Ecosystem Review workshop for 30.

Whilst some of on stage performances lacked a bit of “punch” the private one on one meetings were more insightful.

Our key takeaways follow:

Over 300 attendees. Marketing Procurement is on the rise!

“Old” topics have not gone away: transparency, trust, performance related pay, building relationships with marketing stakeholders, alignment across divisions and markets…they are still major foundational issues for marketing procurement folk, who need skill and experience to tackle them.

Some of the “New” topics are being addressed by the very best marketing procurement teams:

1. A new role for marketing procurement as the “transformers”. The best teams are leading comprehensive change programs including process and tech redesign. They are leaning into their stakeholder to help them change their organisational design, including a lot of insourcing initiatives.
2. The convergence and integration of marketing and technology. The best teams are upskilling in technology and finding new ways to integrate the buying of technologies alongside services.
3. New categories, reimagined categories. The most forward looking teams and looking to the future and merging buying categories or creating new categories. For example, merging PR, Social and Customer care. Or creating a marketing technology specialism (See point 2). Or, redistributing elements of digital into different categories.
4. Agency Ecosystems. Some of the best buyers are redesigning their whole agency Ecosystem. Ground up. Finding a new shape for the agency portfolio and running reviews to deliver a step-change in performance, agility, and value. See a case history here.
5. Value through process. A few procurement teams are realising that value can be created by working with their marketing partners to create new agile processes. These processes take less time, save money, and improve quality of the work. Often procurement are finding the stake money for consultancies to drive this change.
6. The strive to find and embrace innovation and new technology whilst doing your day job. It’s not just about funding innovation but having the process to actively seek out innovation that will deliver your marketing strategy.

If you would like to know more about our Ecosystem Review or any of our other service please contact us here.