Marketing Procurement Awards

Philipp Schuster Interview ‘The bridge builder’: Marketing Procurement Awards Winner – Honorary Achievement

Honorary Achievement Award

Winner: Philipp Schuster. Agency Management & Marketing Partnerships Director, Global Strategic Marketing, Consumer Health, Bayer.

Photo L to R: Craig Inglis (Chair of Judges) Philipp Schuster (Winner) Jeff Cobb & Tina Fegent (Joint Founders of the Marketing Procurement Awards)

Criteria: To honour individual distinction in achievement and exceptional contribution to the Marketing Procurement community over recent years.

Judges Comments: 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 “over recent years” 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.

That sustained body of work is exactly the individual distinction in achievement and exceptional community contribution this award was created to honour.

Insight Interview: Philipp Schuster

By Helen Thompson

At the Marketing Procurement IQ Conference 2026, the inaugural Marketing Procurement Awards (MPA’s), launched by industry evangelists Tina Fegent and Jeff Cobb, recognised some of the function’s best talent.

As the inaugural recipient of the Honorary Achievement Award at the Marketing Procurement Awards 2026, the judges recognised a sustained body of work spanning two decades. MPiQ’s Helen Thompson talks to Philipp Schuster to find out more.

From procurement to marketing: an evolution, not a departure

When the Honorary Achievement award was announced at The Oval in March, the choice of its first recipient felt, to many in the room, self-evident.

After a successful career spanning over two decades in the industry starting in retail and marketing roles at PUMA, followed by a short stint on agency side before being tapped to be one of a few to launch adidas Group’s global marketing procurement team in 2011, Philipp then transferred to the UK to lead the global marketing agency category in Bayer’s Marketing Procurement team in 2016 , he then did something relatively few marketing procurement professionals do.

He crossed the floor. When Bayer’s global CMO invited him to join her team in 2020, the brief was to take what he had built in marketing procurement and go further: to elevate agency relationships from well-managed contracts to genuine strategic partnerships.

“It was a blank piece of paper,” he says. “I wrote my own job description.” The role he designed, Agency Management and Marketing Partnerships Director, was deliberately broader than procurement.

But it would be wrong to see the move as a departure. It was an evolution, the logical next step for someone whose entire career had pointed towards the conviction that the relationship between a company and its agencies is not a commercial arrangement to be managed, but a strategic asset to be built.

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Philipp Schuster will be speaking at the Magic & Logic Webinar

The proof, he notes with characteristic understatement, is that the role is still there. Leadership has changed around it, the organisation has evolved, and the function he created from a blank page has endured because it demonstrably creates value.

The Honorary Achievement award recognises both chapters of that story: the procurement career that built the foundations, and the role he has made his own since.

Know yourself first
At the heart of the thinking that earned Schuster the judges’ recognition sits an idea that sounds simple and is anything but. Before you can find the right agency partner, you have to understand your own organisation: deeply, honestly, and in all its complexity.

“Marketing procurement people must understand first and foremost what their own organisation looks like before seeking an agency or other partners to fit with them,” he has argued. “It’s a core skill.”

A global, decentralised business is a puzzle, and any agency partner has to fit into all of its pieces. That automatically narrows the field, and it changes the job.

The old procurement patterns, the standard negotiation templates, the power play of holding the purse strings across multiple bidders: none of it applies. “The old rules don’t apply anymore.

Marketing procurement sometimes still has a bad rap because it applies old patterns, strategies and negotiation tactics to the new reality.”

The new reality, in Schuster’s view, demands something different: self-knowledge, genuine fit, and the patience to build relationships that can hold real weight.

A body of work, built over time

The Honorary Achievement award is explicitly not a prize for a single project.

The judges recognised, in their words, “not a single headline project but a sustained body of work that has materially raised the bar for what best-in-class marketing procurement leadership looks like.”

In Schuster’s case, that body of work is an accumulation: a consistent philosophy applied over many years, each initiative building on the last.

The workshop-style pitch formats he championed long before they were more broadly evaluated.

The creative incubator programme (Creative Unleashed TM | LinkedIn) which Patricia Corsi initiated gave agencies licence to bring their boldest ideas out of the bottom drawer, work that went on to win Cannes Lions for brands that, a few years earlier, had not even been on the Croisette’s radar.

The steady elevation of agency relationships from individual connections to partnerships at holding company level with e.g. annual Top2Tops between the respective C-Suites, most recently, BOND, the fully integrated agency model at Bayer with Omnicom across Media, Creative, Content & Production that the industry is now watching closely.

And running through all of it, a signature belief: that talent is the real variable, and talent needs to be cared for and nutured.

“As a client you have to inspire your partners,” he says. “If you go in negotiating on hourly rates and percentages, I think you will fail in today’s world. But if you go in with this mindset, the commercial negotiation is not easy, but you have leverage.”

It is a philosophy that treats generosity not as softness but as strategy, and the results, accumulated over years, are what carried him to the stage at The Oval in March.

The foreign secretary

Schuster describes his relationship with the wider industry in a phrase that captures both the pleasure and the purpose of it: “I am almost like the foreign secretary, seeing what happens out there.”

Bringing the outside in, for a team distributed across the globe, is part of the job as he defines it. But it only works because he genuinely enjoys it. “That is just my personality. I enjoy being out there, exchanging with people and learning from each other.”

Anyone who has attended a marketing procurement event in recent years will recognise the truth of this. Schuster is a fixture on the speaker circuit, so much so that there is a gentle running joke in certain circles that a conference without Philipp is not really a conference at all.

It is the kind of teasing that only exists where real affection does. What is less visible from the audience is how much of his community presence is contribution rather than profile-building: the mentoring, the generous sharing of hard-won thinking, the championing of emerging voices.

This, as much as anything he has built inside Bayer, is what the Honorary Achievement was created to recognise. The judges saw it. It is written into the award’s citation.

“I was surprised”

Schuster’s reaction to winning is characteristically modest. He was, he says simply, surprised.

And his reflection on why he was chosen has the quality of a man working out an honest answer in real time rather than reaching for a prepared one. “I guess it is exactly that, bringing marketing and procurement together.

My role almost personifies that.

I was in marketing at the beginning of my career, then agency, then in marketing procurement – And now I bring it all together more strategically in an enterprise marketing team leveraging my experience, network and just general interest and curiosity about this space and the people who drive it forward .

I work with agencies and other key industry players closer than ever before.”

He is quick, instinctively quick, to share the recognition. The work that brought him the most visibility could not have happened without Marion Villette, Bayer’s Head of Marketing and Commercial Procurement, and her team.

“It is not something I could have done by myself,” he says, before adding, with quiet confidence: “But maybe also it would have been more difficult without someone like me in the role, to land it strategically in the organisation.” Both things are true, and that’s rather the point.

What comes next

Ask Schuster about the future and he does not talk about models or structures. He talks about a way of working. Speed, because the world changes too fast for the old cadence of committees and approvals.

Empowerment, because decisions belong with the people closest to the work. And partnership as the default posture: with agencies, with internal stakeholders, with the discipline itself including but not limited to likeminded opinion leaders.

“You cannot manage your suppliers or partners the way you have done it ten, fifteen years ago,” he says. “The world is different, and it will be even more important in the future.”

There is one more thing he wants the discipline to hear, and he returns to it more than once: 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.”

It is advice he has spent twenty years living, and it is the thread that runs through everything the inaugural Honorary Achievement award set out to honour: the career, the philosophy, the generosity, the sustained body of work.