Marketing Procurement

From the other side of the table: Philipp Schuster on bridging marketing and procurement and why it matters

The Honorary Achievement award at the Marketing Procurement Awards, (known as MPAs) is different from the rest. It does not reward a single project or a team’s output in a given year. It recognises something harder to quantify: a sustained body of work that has materially raised the bar for what best-in-class marketing procurement leadership looks like.

Philipp Schuster, Agency Management and Marketing Partnerships Director at Bayer Consumer Health, is the inaugural recipient. Across a career spanning multiple global organisations, Schuster has been, in the judges’ words, “a persistent and respected advocate for elevating marketing procurement from a transactional function into a true strategic partner to marketing,” sharing that thinking generously through speaking, mentoring and championing emerging talent.

That generosity was evident from the moment we arranged this conversation. In his typically modest style, Schuster’s first instinct was to attribute the success to others, and to ask that his close collaborator Marion Villette, Head of Marketing and Commercial Procurement at Bayer, join the interview.

It is, he felt, as much her story as his. That instinct, to share the stage and champion the people around him, is precisely the kind of contribution the Honorary Achievement award was created to recognise.

Six years ago, Schuster made a deliberate move from procurement into marketing, with a vision for what a truly strategic external partnership model could look like at Bayer.

Last year, that vision culminated in a global integrated agency review that brought media, creative and content together under a single holding company partner, run at a speed and with a rigour that few thought possible.

We joined Schuster and Villette to find out how they did it.

On moving from procurement into marketing

Philipp: The honest answer is that you have to go with the opportunity when it presents itself. Our global CMO asked me to join her team, to take what I had done in procurement and go further with it. It was a blank piece of paper. I wrote my own job description and deliberately made it broader than just procurement.

In the first few years we elevated from agency-level relationships to holding company level. And now it culminates in what we did last year, fully integrated partnerships, with agencies genuinely accountable to us for business outcomes. I think the proof is that [the role] is still there. It has proven to be a valuable resource.

And what I love about it is that the connection with procurement is always there. Marion and I support each other constantly. Collectively we have made our partnerships more sound and more strategic for the business.

Marion: Philipp’s superpower is that he was born to build relationships. This role is exactly where that superpower can flourish. But beyond the individual, the existence of a dedicated partnership role like this sends a signal. It tells our agency partners how seriously Bayer wants to invest in these relationships. That credibility matters enormously.

On what procurement needs to do differently

Philipp: Sitting in marketing now, surrounded by creative people with very different viewpoints, I can see something important for procurement professionals to hear. Procurement people need to sell. As much as they are buyers, they need to be sellers, selling themselves, selling the discipline, selling the value they create. Procurement can default into its traditional role, and in today’s world that is not enough.

Marion: This is exactly where the sweet spot of our model comes in. If the same person is negotiating hard commercially and simultaneously trying to nurture a genuine growth partnership, that tension is real and difficult to resolve. Philipp carries the partnership vision. My team carries the commercial rigour and the rollout of that vision. Neither of us could do what the other does.

The first conversation we had with agencies entering the review was not about commercials at all. It was simply: what does partnership mean to you? That set the tone for everything that followed.

On Bayer’s operating model and what it changed

Philipp: To understand how we work, you first need to understand how Bayer is organised. We work under Dynamic Shared Ownership, DSO. Rather than sitting in functional silos, you form work teams around specific projects, pulling the right people from across the organisation regardless of where they sit. No one owns a permanent team. I have actually worked like this for six years by necessity, because I have never had a team of my own.

So when Bayer adopted DSO as its operating model, it felt like the organisation had caught up with how I had already been working. It supercharged everything. And it maps naturally onto how agencies work. Their home is their agency. The work happens in Bond, our integrated agency model for Bayer, where resources are pulled together and meet our teams.

Marion: It creates a sense of belonging that goes beyond the traditional agency structure. We had one of our key leads announce he was moving to a new role as Bond Lead. Not moving to McCann, not to Omnicom. Bond Lead. That tells you something important about where the identity and commitment sits.

The DSO model also gave us the right conditions for the review. It meant we could form a small, empowered decision-making team without traditional governance slowing everything down. That was not a side effect. It was fundamental to how the whole process worked.

On running the integrated agency review

Philipp: Rather than a large committee, we formed a work team of eight to ten people, each fully empowered to make decisions. One person for EMEA, representing fifty countries. Two for the US. These were the decision makers, not advisers.

We started at Cannes, ran the global pitch in a day in London three weeks later, then four regional pitches in a single day follow-the-sun across Asia, Europe, US and Latam, with three holding companies each time. Within a month we knew where this was going. Speed matters enormously. If you have too much time, you lose momentum.

Marion: The Pitch in a Day format levelled the playing field completely. The agencies did not know which brand they would be working on until the morning of the pitch. What we were evaluating was how quickly they could pull together a team that had never worked together, how fast they could turn strategy into activation, and how well they used their technology.

The assessment of the three holding companies was almost identical from global to regional teams. That consistency was the proof that the process worked. Leadership endorsed a decision throughout. They did not make one. That is a very different thing.

On managing the Omnicom- IPG merger mid-process

Philipp: All three holding companies were incumbents to varying degrees, so there was no clean challenger versus incumbent dynamic. The speed neutralised any advantage existing relationships might have given anyone. When IPG won, the Omnicom acquisition was becoming a reality. We made a conscious decision to proceed, choosing to see it as access to an even larger, more scaled organisation.

We also ran this process right in the middle of the merger, which in a way worked in our favour. We became something of a showcase for the new Omnicom. We punch a bit above our weight in that context.

Marion: I want to be honest that it was not smooth sailing. Every single week there was something new to manage. What kept us steady was having two functions aligned at every step, always looking at the pros and cons together, never one of us carrying the uncertainty alone.

We had our first quarterly business review last week. When you look at what has been built in four months, it is quite impressive. We are on the right track.

On the commercial model and what success looks like

Marion: We have brought media, creative and content together under one integrated partnership, a large part of our total working and non-working marketing investment. The remuneration model has shifted significantly towards performance. Our results become [the agency’s] results.

We speak to four Bond leadership team members who steer everything for Bayer. Not ten sister agencies. Four people who own the model and are aligned to our needs. We are moving from transaction to partnership to growth enabler. Those are not just words. They describe a real progression, and we are somewhere in the middle of it.

Philipp: The model is still being built. We are not saying it works perfectly. We are saying we can see the upside, we can see the traction, and we are committed to proving it day by day. If you want the best talent working on your business, you have to inspire them.

Someone said to me recently that they wished every one of their clients had someone like me working with them. I think that is the simplest way to describe what we are trying to do. Build something that the industry looks at and says, that is what a genuinely strategic client relationship looks like. We are not there yet. But we are building it.

The judges on Philipp Schuster

“Philipp Schuster is a deserving inaugural recipient of the Honorary Achievement award. Across a career spanning multiple global organisations and culminating in his current role at Bayer, Philipp has been a persistent and respected advocate for elevating marketing procurement from a transactional function into a true strategic partner to marketing.

His work on agency management, partnership models and procurement and marketing collaboration has shaped the way many of his peers think about the discipline. He has generously shared that thinking through the wider community by speaking, mentoring and championing emerging talent.

The judging panel recognised that contribution not as a single headline project but as a sustained body of work that has materially raised the bar for what best-in-class marketing procurement leadership looks like.”

See Marion Villette and Philipp Schuster

Marketing Procurement Awards (MPAs)

Marketing Procurement iQ will be publishing interviews with all five winners of the Marketing Procurement Awards, including an in-depth interview with Philipp Schuster on Monday 13th July.

To see a list if the winners visit the awards here