Six Best Practices for Procuring Marketing Services

Editor's note: This Spend Matters Plus brief is a refresh of our 2013 series on category management, which originally ran on Spend Matters PRO. 

My personal involvement with procurement functions trying to get to grips with the marketing spend category goes back some 25 years, and I had some successes and failures in my time as a CPO in several large organisations. It’s a category where procurement has been slow to increase influence, but according to figures from the World Federation of Advertisers, we have gradually reached a position where the procurement function is estimated to have between 50%–80% spend coverage in the category (depending on the geographic maturity, with firms in Europe at the top of the scale and South America at the bottom).

This is starting to feel like a coming of age for marketing services procurement, with some very impressive people in senior category roles speaking and a general air that clear best practice is emerging. There are still tensions between procurement and marketing staff in some organisations, but relationships seem to be improving and a sense of where and how procurement can contribute is certainly developing.

In this Spend Matters Plus article, we’ve pulled together some key learnings to come up with six best practice suggestions for CPOs or marketing services procurement leads to consider. We’ll have three around strategic category and sourcing issues today, and three focusing more on engagement strategy and people in Part 2.