Creative & Content

Better, faster, cheaper: this is procurement without compromise

Better, faster, cheaper. That’s the holy trinity that marketing procurement has traditionally chased when it comes to content, but the best you could realistically hope for was two out of three. Do it better and faster, but pay through the nose. Do it better and cheaper, but lose the speed that keeps you competitive. Do it faster and cheaper, but sacrifice the quality that drives engagement and loyalty amongst your customers.

AI-powered content automation means that, for the first time, you can now have all three. You can create high-quality, localised, personalised, relevant content that tells the perfect story for every possible customer interaction.

You can move with speed and agility, while remaining responsive to market shifts, trends, customer demands, seasonal events, and more. And you can eliminate the operational overheads you would previously associate with content at scale.

It’s no longer a compromise. It means that pairing the discipline of efficiency with the ambition of effectiveness, so every dollar saved becomes a dollar that compounds into better brand outcomes over time, is finally possible.

With this shift comes a change in perspective. Procurement now has the power to reframe what success looks like, from “How much did we cut?” or “How much faster did we go?”, to “How much better are we performing?”.

When that happens, we start optimising solutions instead of merely comparing rates. We measure adoption, not just implementation. We ask not only what the work costs, but what it enables — faster cycle times, stronger governance, improved consistency across channels, and better consumer engagement.

That’s where real transformation starts.

Collaboration sits at the heart of this transformation. I’ve watched partnerships flourish when procurement invites marketing, finance, and operations into the process early.

A generic, written response to an RFP won’t get you those results. You need a solution built around the brand’s real challenges and opportunities, one that blends people, process, and technology into a working system.

Genuine dialogue with stakeholders and suppliers produces living solutions that ultimately deliver value back to the business. And the more transformational the ask, the truer that becomes.

Engage early. Go deeper. Move faster later

There’s a saying I’ve learned to trust: the more time you invest up front, the faster you go later. Thirty minutes with a merchandising lead to understand seasonal bottlenecks. Half an hour with legal to map governance risks. A short working session with market teams to surface localisation realities.

These conversations feel expensive in the moment, but they pay for themselves many times over in adoption and speed to value. Brands that make this time win, whereas those that don’t often discover too late that their “savings” were a false economy.

Look at major companies like Haleon and John Lewis Partnership, and how they implemented change. They didn’t just turn on technology; they co-designed a new content ecosystem with supplier expertise alongside their teams — creating economies of scale and effectiveness in adaptation, and enabling more personalised content at market speed.

If you’re expecting to simply plug in new AI and tech and then hit the ground running, you’re likely to be disappointed.

Co-creating a tech-led operating model

The best outcomes happen when procurement and marketing shape bespoke, high-impact content solutions together. In a fast-moving landscape, “off the shelf” is rarely the right (or complete) solution.

You need clarity on roles, workflows, and handoffs. You need the right combination of partner talent and internal capability. You need commercial models that align to outcomes — not only inputs — so everyone pulls in the same direction.

We’ve seen this in our work building modern content operations with enterprise brands, where the goal isn’t more assets — it’s better operations. Faster cycles. Consistent brand governance.

The agility to adapt across channels without sacrificing quality. Better creativity. When leadership leans in, when stakeholders are present, and when the operating model is codesigned, the shift is tangible, both in the numbers and in the culture.

In terms of technology, the platforms you use should serve the operating model, not the other way around. I’m not here to sell you a shiny tool. I’m here to tell you that point solutions without proper integration create drag.

Email chains become the workflow. Spreadsheets become the system of record. And that’s where efficiency disappears.

Procurement can change that by insisting on full Content Marketing Platforms and partners that connect the end-to-end flow — briefing, creation, approvals, localisation, activation, and measurement — so teams don’t just produce faster; they learn faster and govern better.

That’s how you build resilience in a landscape that won’t stop changing. One of our big beliefs at ITG is that tools alone don’t transform companies — cultures and operating systems do. When you wire the right behaviours into the work itself, that’s when you see real improvement.

Invest where change actually happens

If you want faster adoption and greater ROI, invest in the parts of change management that really make a difference:

Stakeholder alignment. Make the “why” unmistakable. When leaders show up visibly, change accelerates.

User education. Train for the job to be done, not just the feature list. Role-based enablement beats generic “tool training” every time.

Process rehearsal. Pilot the end to end workflow with real work. Remove the friction before you scale.

Measurement that matters. Don’t just track activity. Look at cycle time, reuse, variance reduction, and in market impact, and tie those to incentives so the system reinforces itself.

These are modest investments with big returns. Small clientside change budgets — skills, communication, transition support — unlock a very quick ROI that is too often underestimated. And as always, the credibility is highest when senior client stakeholders lead that charge.

A simple scorecard for procurement

If you’re choosing content partners or platforms right now, make sure you have:

1. The intelligence to know what works: Leverage AI to understand the content you need to create before you create it, and feed those insights directly into your operational model.
2. A fully connected content ecosystem: Bring briefing, workflows, data sources, AI-enabled automation, a smart DAM, approvals, activation (and more) together in a single Content Marketing Platform solution.
3. Change management expertise: Look for a partner that has experience managing marketing transformation, with a team that understands the process and can support you beyond the go-live date.
4. A demo-ready platform: Ensure that what you see is the reality of what you get when the tech drops. Too many demos show what the tech might be able to do, if you wait around for long enough.

If you aren’t getting all of these, pause. Going slower now will help you go much faster further down the line.

Final thoughts

We are all navigating a landscape that changes faster than calendars can keep up. That’s why I’m optimistic about procurement’s role — because you sit at the intersection of rigor and possibility.

You now have the power to demand efficiency while insisting on effectiveness. You can protect the present and fund the future. You can make sure we’re not just buying cheaper hours, but building stronger systems.

My outlook is pretty simple: engage early, go deeper, and aim higher. By investing in the right partner and the right technology, procurement can both balance the books and raise the bar.

If we do that together, the savings we celebrate this quarter will become the capabilities that drive us forward for years to come.

About the author

Andrew Swinand, CEO of ITG