Marketing Procurement

A SatNav for Marketing Procurement in 2025: AI, reconvergence, integration and paying for performance

New ways of thinking

The significant changes in the marketing landscape also call for new thinking in marketing procurement.

This year’s Marketing Procurement IQ conference will provide senior procurement people with robust navigation through a marketing landscape that has evolved significantly in the last twelve months.

AI will rightly dominate the discussion.

It is certain that AI will change the marketing services industry more than the Internet did and this will have consequences for everyone involved in marketing, with substantial implications for procurement.

Today’s key marketing challenge for advertisers is to mix mass effect that embeds longer-term consumer preference (‘brand’) with the more immediate response from individual media (‘performance’). Then the task is how to measure that balance and keep optimising it, brand-by-brand, day-by-day.

One solution to enable this is the re-convergence of creative and media, supported by AI-enabled technology and data, with people and cost freed up by automation in order to craft more effective advertising.

Advertisers would like to reconverge content and channels and then integrate them, often with a range of in-house disciplines and resources.

Increasingly they are seeking ways to bring those disciplines together to create a more coherent whole that provides greater accountability in ‘closed loop’ systems.

A good example is Retail Media Networks; these require close internal collaboration between people in brand marketing, sales, distribution, product, trade marketing, ‘shopper’, data, insight and technology, as well as external agencies.

Artificial Intelligence is seen as a key enabler of this process, aggregating data across multiple channels for the purposes of optimisation-the ‘flywheel’ effect.

This allows them to measure performance more accurately and thereby pay external providers according to business performance.

Thus we are starting to see a converged and integrated combination of content, channel, data, technology and talent as the winning hand for both advertisers and their commercial partners.

There are now many permutations to achieve this, spanning in-house and external resources, so there are many decisions and choices to be made.

However, advertisers are pursuing two main paths through this landscape. They are looking for an expanded ‘one stop shop’, especially from the Holding Companies, re-bundling services.

Nick Manning will be giving his keynote presentation The year ahead: AI, reconvergence and integration at the Marketing Procurement iQ Conference in London on 26th March. To attend book HERE

Alternatively, they are looking for best-in-class solutions from a diverse range of providers.

Whichever route advertisers chose, contract and governance management is of huge importance.

The bigger contracts arising from re-bundling clearly require longer and stronger rigour of contractual design and compliance measurement.

The alternative to re-bundling is to employ a more diverse range of potential partners, including individual content creators, but who also still have to be actively managed from a contractual and governance angle.

Whichever path they choose, advertisers are tasked with the management of multiple contracts that are broader and deeper than ever before, requiring continuous tracking.

As outlined in ‘The Great Balancing Act’ from Flock Associates, marketing procurement teams now need to get to grips with new developments fuelled by AI in personalisation, social commerce, influencer, retail media and more; these do not replace other disciplines but are additive, making it more important to achieve the right mix.

The significant changes in the marketing landscape also call for new thinking in marketing procurement.

The established means of securing cost reductions have largely run their course. The usual methods of deriving savings are producing lower returns and arguably leading to a situation where advertising is faster and cheaper but not necessarily better, to the detriment of impact and effectiveness.

Future bigger procurement gains will come from restructuring of marketing services provision, new ways of working in the AI age and more focus on effectiveness over input efficiency. This will require a new hybrid fusion of procurement and marketing, where the traditional skills of the latter also apply to the former.

This includes strategic marketing thinking across the converged disciplines of content, data and technology and how they relate to contractual and governance rigour.

Future savings should ideally come from optimisation of spend rather than being unit cost-based; it makes sense to reduce expenditure through better effectiveness than to pursue savings that may not even be real.

Media Day

The second day of the Marketing Procurement IQ conference is devoted to media. The sessions will cover the most pressing issues that keep marketing procurement teams awake at night.

The conference will dive into the big procurement questions surrounding AI, reconvergence, integration and pay-by-performance and other pressing issues of the day, including:

• The use of generative AI in media agency services
• Cross-media measurement and how Origin will improve efficiency of TV/Video audience measurement
• The latest news in Retail Media and Digital Commerce and the implications for procurement
• Procurement’s role in driving growth in performance marketing
• Best practice in internal operational and organisational thinking for media excellence
• The effective management of multiple suppliers to deliver operational efficiency
• The latest techniques for selecting, appraising and paying media agencies and other external partners
• How to improve agency performance without a pitch
• The most advanced measurement of outcome-orientated media effectiveness
• The latest thinking on measuring media value
• The management of large datasets to improve choices and transparency
• The most up-to-date processes for contract management and continuous automated contract compliance verification
• The most advanced way to audit media buying performance
• How diversity and inclusivity drive commercial benefits

There will be a stellar line-up of senior procurement people and specialist providers, both on-stage and in the room. The conversation will be open and lively with plenty of scope for dialogue.

Procurement people may not know how fast they should drive in this landscape but after the conference they should certainly know the best direction to go in.