Marketing Procurement Awards

Beiersdorf Interview – Double Winners at the Marketing Procurement Awards

Marketing Procurement Team of the Year Category

Winner: Beiersdorf

Photo: Marco Dogliani and Charlotte Ghestem of Beiersdorf

Criteria: To acknowledge and reward a team who have demonstrated outstanding performance and innovation working with internal and external partners.

Judges’ Comments: Beiersdorf’s Global Procurement Marketing New Operating Model team, led by Ana Palma, was a stand-out winner. Judges highlighted the rigour evident across both the written submission and the supporting documents, calling it clear evidence of the discipline that runs through the teams day-to-day.

The team has fundamentally repositioned procurement away from a small central group managing global processes towards a model rooted in regional and market expertise, tightly connected to the marketing teams it serves. That cultural shift, partnering more closely with marketing internally while raising the bar with agency partners externally, was backed by tangible data points and a measurable lift in stakeholder partnership.

As one judge put it on reading the case, “they’re definitely a clear winner.” This is a team that has redefined what good looks like for an embedded, value-creating marketing procurement function working hand-in-hand with internal and external partners.

Marketing Procurement Project of the Year Category

Winner: Agata Frank. “Measure. Manage. Transform.” A Procurement-led drive to put media on the Net Zero roadmap, Beiersdorf.

Criteria: To recognise projects that deliver exceptional value to stakeholders and drive meaningful business impact.

Agata Frank’s “Measure. Manage. Transform.” initiative at Beiersdorf, a procurement-led drive to put media spend onto the Net Zero roadmap, captured both halves of the criteria in a single piece of work. Judges praised entries where procurement had “really initiated, invented the initiative and then led it”; this project did exactly that, taking ownership of an issue that crosses agencies, partners and global media supply chains, and turning it into a measurable programme.

The project pairs hard data and operational discipline with a sustainability outcome the wider business care about, delivering exceptional value for stakeholders and meaningful business impact in equal measure.

It has also reset how procurement is viewed inside Beiersdorf, moving the function, in the judges’ words, “into a much more positive growth light.” A textbook example of a procurement-led project driving transformation through measurable impact.

Insight Interviews

By Helen Thompson

Winning from the inside out: How Beiersdorf’s marketing procurement team is redefining what the function can achieve

Introduction

Beiersdorf took home two awards at the inaugural Marketing Procurement Awards (known as the MPAs) in 2026. Behind the wins is a team rebuilding itself from the inside out. Marketing Procurement iQ caught up with Project of the Year winner Agata Frank, as well as Ana Palma and Charlotte Ghestem, representing the larger team behind the Team of the Year win.

A Winning Team on a Transformation Journey

Winning is rarely accidental. Behind Beiersdorf’s double win at the inaugural MPAs, presented at the Marketing Procurement iQ Conference at The Oval in March, is a team intentionally reinventing itself, from how it’s organised, to who it serves, and what it could achieve by operating at the top of its potential.

The Team of the Year award recognises a fundamental reimagining of how a global marketing procurement function structures itself to serve the business. The Project of the Year award, won by Agata Frank, Global Category Manager Media, recognises what becomes possible when that ambition is given room to breathe.

Winning Insights: Team of the Year Category: Beiersdorf Global Marketing Procurement Operating Model Transformation

Beiersdorf is one of the world’s most recognised FMCG companies, home to brands including Nivea, Eucerin, and La Prairie. Marketing investment at this scale is both substantial and strategically complex, which makes the quality of marketing procurement not a back-office question but a business-critical one.

The Beiersdorf team understands this intrinsically and has acted on it, fundamentally redesigning their team structure to deliver at the highest level. As the MPA judges observed, “This is a team that has redefined what good looks like for an embedded, value-creating marketing procurement function working hand-in-hand with internal and external partners.”

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Charlotte Ghestem and Agata Frank will be speaking at the Magic & Logic Webinar

During our conversation the team reflects that the decision to transform didn’t arrive as a single moment of clarity. It built over several years, as the team recognised a growing gap between how they were organised and what the evolving business needed from them. Their structure, four category-based teams each with its own lane, had once made sense.

But the marketing landscape had become too interconnected for that model to keep pace with. Agencies don’t organise themselves by procurement category. Senior marketing stakeholders don’t think in category silos. And as complexity increased, the team knew that a change was needed.

The most visible symptom was fragmentation. The same stakeholder might be approached by several different procurement colleagues for related topics, each an expert in their own category, but none holding the full picture. As the team describes it: in the old model, a stakeholder responsible for multiple categories would need to navigate multiple procurement relationships for what was, from their perspective, one conversation.

The business needed a procurement team that could match its own complexity. Three pressures crystallised the case for change: simplifying and matching market reality, presenting one face to the business, and rebuilding supplier relationships that had become equally fragmented.

The new model: built around the business

What followed was not an adjustment of the existing structure but a wholesale redesign, built around the business rather than around procurement’s internal logic.

The new model has four integrated components. Regional squads, covering Global, EUNA, NEA, and EM, serve as the primary interface for marketing stakeholders, working across all categories so that the business always has one procurement relationship regardless of what it needs.

Category Strategy Leads ensure long-term strategic coherence across portfolios. Strategic Supplier Leads are elevating SRM to a next level core discipline, with dedicated roles and clear accountability focused on the relationships that matter most. And Procurement Operations, positioned deliberately as a strategic enabler rather than a back-office function, brings consistency to governance, tooling, and ways of working. AI innovation sits within this function, with specialists feeding new tools and requirements back into the broader Procurement Excellence framework.

The proof: measuring success outside procurement

The real measure of whether a new operating model is working, the team argues, is not what happens inside procurement. It is what happens outside it.

Early signals are already visible across three areas. The first is the quality of conversation with senior marketing stakeholders. Where squad members previously entered those rooms armed with deep category knowledge but a narrow view, they can now hold the full picture of what procurement is doing across a stakeholder’s entire portfolio.

As the team puts it: “If you enter a room with a VP, you’re able to talk about media, not because you know how all media buying works, but because you know where the suppliers are in your regions, on your brands, and you’re having a very different type of discussion.”

The squad model makes this possible because members connect across all categories for their stakeholder group, building the breadth of understanding that senior conversations demand.

The second proof point is finance. One squad, more established than the others, was involved in last year’s financial planning cycle for the first time. It was, the team admits, not ideal yet. But they were in the room, and their participation was impactful.

This year, finance is reviewing targets and savings driven by that squad, and the expectation is clear: for the next cycle, the invitation will come earlier and more deliberately. “You earn a seat at the table,” the team says. “You don’t just ask to be invited.”

The third is the regions. The squad model is beginning to close a knowledge gap between global, regional and local procurement, ensuring that regional and local teams are no longer blind to global categories, and that global teams understand the realities of local market execution.

The team is clear about what success ultimately looks like: “Success for me would be them thinking, when they do their financial planning, ‘maybe we should ask procurement.’ The business coming to us. Not ‘I need to negotiate this, allow procurement.’ But ‘I need to approach this differently.’”

Strategic thinking in action

The team transformation created the conditions for strategic procurement to flourish. But the appetite for that kind of thinking was already present. Agata Frank’s media sustainability project, recognised as the MP Awards’ Project of the Year, is evidence of what becomes possible when a procurement professional has the curiosity and the organisational support to think well beyond category management.

It is also a leading example of best practice in one of the most underdeveloped areas of marketing procurement anywhere in the industry: the measurement and reduction of media-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Winning Insights: Project of the Year Category: Media Emissions & Net Zero at Beiersdorf

Winning Project of the Year against the full field of submissions, not within a sustainability category but across all entries, says something significant about where sustainable media procurement has arrived as a discipline.

For winner Agata Frank, the recognition is personal, professional, and reflects four years of dedication and continuous development. It’s an example of how the new Marketing Procurement Awards can raise the profile of not just an exceptional individual contribution, but an industry-wide issue that’s finally coming of age.

When Agata Frank joined Beiersdorf in 2021, sustainability within media procurement  amounted to basic due diligence tasks such as ensuring suppliers met the code of conduct requirements. She saw the gap immediately.

Media and marketing were absent from Beiersdorf’s Net Zero roadmap entirely, and the only estimate of media-related emissions was spend-based, imprecise, growing proportionally with budget increases, and offering no actionable levers for reduction. Rather than waiting for a mandate, she built the case herself.

She pursued two professional certifications with Beiersdorf’s support: the Cambridge Business Sustainability Management programme for broad sustainability literacy, and the Ad Net Zero Essentials qualification for advertising-specific depth.

She engaged actively with the WFA Sustainable Marketing Forum, Ad Net Zero, and ISBA, bringing sustainability criteria into agency pitches, contracts, and performance evaluation.

The award-winning project, delivered in partnership with Omnicom Sustainable Solutions using the Global Media Sustainability Framework and enhanced by digital platform analysis from Ebiquity and Scope3, had two clear goals, both achieved.

The first was to replace the spend-based estimate with an activity-based measurement of media emissions across all channels. The second was to collect granular platform-level data to inform Beiersdorf’s media guidelines, which now include a dedicated sustainable media section for the first time.

The most striking finding concerns the programmatic supply chain. Environments associated with disproportionately high emissions per impression, including made-for-advertising sites, low viewability inventory, ad fraud, and long-tail placements, are the same environments that erode media quality and threaten brand safety.

Streamlining the programmatic supply chain, reducing the number of bidders in an auction while maintaining reach, cuts emissions, improves transparency, and strengthens investment efficiency simultaneously. As Agata Frank puts it: “This is not only a waste of emissions, it is a waste of money and potentially a brand safety threat.” The business case writes itself.

Collaboration with agency partners has been central to the project’s success. “We work on those topics together, not against each other,” Agata Frank says. “We don’t negotiate on sustainability, or on human rights. This is a topic we align on together.” Large agency networks have been receptive, with leading holding companies already well advanced on their own sustainability commitments.

For smaller suppliers, the requirements are kept appropriately proportionate, with Beiersdorf developing a broader programme to support the whole supply base on climate and sustainability topics.

Year-on-year tracking is not yet established, and Agata Frank is clear that this project is a beginning, not a destination. The internal awareness it has generated is already creating momentum, with colleagues from corporate sustainability working actively alongside Agata Frank to shape the next steps.

Her advice to procurement teams considering a similar journey is direct: align with corporate sustainability targets, invest in education, engage with industry bodies, and resist waiting for a perfect strategy. “Progress over perfection,” she says. “Just start.”

The implications for Marketing Procurement

Beiersdorf’s double win at the inaugural MP Awards is significant not just as an achievement but as a signal. This is a team that chose to challenge itself, to ask whether its structure was serving the business, whether its ambitions matched what the function could genuinely contribute, and whether it was equipped to lead on issues that marketing procurement has historically left to others.

The answers it found, and the changes it made in response, offer something tangible to every marketing procurement team wrestling with the same questions. A structure built around the business rather than internal categories. Cross-functional relationships treated as the real measure of success. And the courage to pursue strategic initiatives even before the frameworks exist, even before there is an obvious mandate to do so.

The awards are recognition of where this team has arrived. The more interesting question is where they go next.