Marketing Procurement

From Transparency to Transformation: Insights from Marketing Procurement iQ Stockholm Summit

Measuring Success

Most significantly, the majority indicated that their procurement and finance leadership now recognises non-traditional value metrics as measures of success, particularly in the media category

The day’s programme tackled four key themes: media transparency, contract management, production bidding processes, and the transformative potential of AI.

What became clear throughout was that procurement teams are navigating unprecedented complexity whilst simultaneously being asked to deliver more strategic value than ever before.

Turning Transparency Challenges into Opportunities

Fredrik Kinge, CEO and founder of ECI Media Management, opened the day with an optimistic reframing of a familiar challenge. Rather than dwelling on the problems facing online advertisers, Kinge encouraged attendees to see increasing transparency as an opportunity.

Alongside Mazi Sajjadi, ECI’s Head of Digital for the Nordics, he outlined how focusing on performance analysis can drive both transparency and higher media ROI.

Combining general principles with regional examples, Kinge explored how advertisers can boost the overall value of media investment by over 25% (ECI client data, 2025). Value in terms of CPM is lost when campaign visibility, brand suitability and target frequency are diluted.

Kinge highlighted that whilst Made for Advertising (MFA) sites are less prevalent in the Nordics than elsewhere, barriers to campaign visibility persist, for example, YouTube channel lists with limited brand suitability.

The solution? Combining close alignment on definitions with media agencies with rigorous monitoring of performance to increase visibility, reduce waste and improve cost efficiency.

This theme resonated throughout the subsequent panel discussion.

Kristina Kuzmova, Category Manager for Global Marketing and Media at Betsson Group, brought a unique perspective to the conversation, having worked across all three sides of the media buying triangle: as an auditor, at a media agency, and now in procurement.

Her experience shaped a pragmatic view: “everybody lies” might be overstating it, but clarity of expectations between clients, agencies, and consultants is essential.

David Little, Global Category Manager for Media and Content at H&M, raised an equally important practical question for the Nordic markets: what’s the value of conducting media pitches, particularly in smaller markets?

His point that the outputs must outweigh the potential disruption prompted nods around the room.

The Contract Management Challenge

Jane Dormer from Media Marketing Compliance brought the conversation into the world of contract governance. As the marketing supply chain becomes more fragmented the challenges of managing multiple contract touchpoints are intensifying.

The interactive element of this session proved particularly revealing. Most of the audience indicated that contract management was seen as procurement’s role, with the majority responsible for three to five (or more) marketing subcategories, and many feeling unable to proactively manage all supplier relationships in their remit.

This tallies with results from MMC’s recent survey, which indicate that 77% of contracts end up as the responsibility of procurement, 70% of category managers are responsible for over 15 media and marketing contracts, and only 45% of respondents are able to manage four or more contracts proactively.

For many advertisers, the statistically inevitable conclusion is that an increasingly large tail of contracts receives only light touch management.

The desire for more capacity in this area was palpable. 62% of MMC’s respondents say time pressure is their biggest obstacle, and audience discussion corroborated that the reality of stretched resources makes proactive contract management challenging.

This led naturally into a discussion about how external partners, AI implementation and other tools could help automate some of the administrative burden, potentially increasing contract coverage across the portfolio.

As the panel explored where responsibility should sit, it became clear there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. What matters is ensuring business involvement in evaluation and management, with procurement providing the strategic oversight and tools to make this scalable.

Production Transparency: Navigating the Creative Bidding Process

After lunch, Zoë Senior and Kristin Mellqvist from Claire Randall Consulting led an informative session on transparency in the creative bidding process. With the marked increase in in-house agency production models, traditional competitive bidding approaches don’t always translate smoothly into transparency.

The CRC team posed the questions “How do you ensure bids are competitive when you’re working with an in-house production company? Is triple-bidding even possible in this context?

And crucially, how do you protect creativity whilst maintaining financial rigour?”

In CRC’s and the WFA’s (World Federation of Advertisers) recent joint white paper “Global Content Production: 2025 Update,” 63% of 50 respondents in senior marketing procurement roles across over 10 industry sectors say they know who is producing their content, and how much money is being spent.

However, 63% state that transparency issues are very high on their agenda, and only 23% always competitively bid production spend.

This gap between concern and action is further complicated by the growing market share of holding companies for in-house setups, who may have little incentive to transparently bid out production spend.

The CRC team’s recommendations to advertisers include creating clear Production Guidelines, engaging expert production personnel to drive strong governance over the use of in-house models, including independent production partners in all bidding processes, and routinely leveraging third party benchmarking and audit providers.

The panel session confirmed that engaging external partners is indeed becoming more common practice, particularly for resource-constrained teams needing to ensure value in production.

The human element in agency relationships is an increasingly important counterbalance to the cost-opacity that AI use introduces, as those clients who build trust are the most likely to receive a share of the resultant savings.

AI Transformation: Promise and Reality

Iain Seers, CEO of RightSpend, brought the day’s final presentation before the closing panel.

His message was clear: AI, automation, and data-driven decision-making are no longer futuristic concepts. They’re fundamental tools that are reshaping procurement’s role in business strategy from cost-cutter to strategic partner.

Rather than replacing human expertise, AI should be the powerhouse that enhances decision-making, and procurement should take a leading role at the forefront of this change.

RightSpend’s recent collaboration with ISBA, the ISBA Agency Benchmark Report, found that 40% of respondents’ agencies provide transparency around AI use and the associated impact on fees.

However, 95% have not yet negotiated agency remuneration for AI-related services. In the subsequent panel discussion, Kuzmova articulated similar concerns that many in the room were grappling with: if AI is producing derivative material, who owns the IP rights?

Who maintains creative control? What’s the right price when some suppliers are using AI and others aren’t?

The audience poll that followed revealed a fascinating gap between personal AI adoption and organisational implementation. Everyone in the room uses AI in their daily personal lives and increasingly feels confident applying it to simple work tasks.

However, very few organisations have a roadmap to implement agentic AI systems at scale for procurement operations.

Several factors explain this gap. Firstly, the agentic AI technology needed to address the end-to-end procure-to-pay landscape is still evolving. Whilst the art of the possible is still being defined, first movers in the room from technology manufacturers are already piloting back-office, and procurement intake capabilities.

Concerns over legal, regulatory, and compliance risk are limiting enterprise-level appetite for the most sensitive P2P applications in contracting and financial processes.

Organisational size matters too, as does industry context. Kuzmova noted that Betsson, operating in the highly regulated gambling environment, takes a cautious approach to adopting new technologies, ensuring they are reliable and compliant with applicable standards and legal requirements before making any decisions.

Yet practical applications are emerging, as procurement teams are unwilling to wait for a top-down organisational push on AI use. Little shared concrete examples from H&M, where AI use can adjust generic contract templates to specific deals, ensuring appropriate clauses are amended.

For contracts under a certain spend threshold, this approach could save weeks of legal review time, allowing lawyers to review mature drafts rather than starting from scratch.

A Changing Definition of Success

The day concluded with myself, Helen Thompson of Helen Thompson Consulting, chairing a client panel that brought Kuzmova and Little together to reflect on the themes that had emerged, and just how much the discipline is evolving.

Perhaps the most striking insight came from a final audience poll on how procurement success is measured. In a show of hands, most of the audience said financial targets still formed part of procurement performance reviews.

For a minority, annual compensation was still hard-linked to savings delivery, but in most cases missed savings targets didn’t automatically mean a poor overall performance review.

Most significantly, the majority indicated that their procurement and finance leadership now recognises non-traditional value metrics as measures of success, particularly in the media category.

This represents a fundamental shift in how marketing procurement is valued, with the focus expanding beyond pure cost reduction to encompass efficiency, transparency, measurable value creation, and strategic partnership.

As attendees gathered for networking drinks, the consensus was clear: marketing procurement is at a crossroads. The challenges are significant. Stretched resources, increasing complexity, rapid technological change.

But so are the opportunities; by embracing transparency, leveraging technology thoughtfully, and maintaining the human relationships that underpin successful partnerships, procurement teams can establish themselves as indispensable strategic partners.

FURTHER READING

WFA report in partnership with CRC, Global Production Update 2025: WFA/CRC report

Link to full white paper (for WFA members only): WFA/CRC report for members only

ISBA Agency Benchmark Report is available for ISBA members at www.isba.co.uk