Procure This!

By Bill Duggan

ANA’s Advertising Financial Management runs Sunday-Wednesday in Florida. For the first time ever, this annual event is sold out. 400+ people will be in attendance and many of these attendees will be client procurement/sourcing people.

One of the conference sessions is entitled, “Procurement: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” and will debut results of a survey among (a) client procurement; (b) client marketing; and (c) agencies on the state of marketing procurement.  We can’t reveal the juicy stuff until the conference, but in the meantime, here are the survey findings that cover information such as the background/level of experience of procurement professionals and reporting structure.

• Marketing procurement has been in existence, on average, for 10 years. 
• Meanwhile, a marketing procurement professional has an average of 7 years in marketing procurement and 12 years total experience as procurement professional.

A common critique is that many procurement professionals lack proper marketing training—but the numbers above show that marketing procurement is still in its infancy (at many companies) and the fact that there is 7 years average experience in marketing procurement versus 10 years average existence for the department is impressive.

The backgrounds of marketing procurement people are pretty equally divided:

• 43% were previously in another procurement role, non-marketing
• 38% were previously in a marketing or agency role

A debate we’ve heard – “Is it better to have a procurement person go into marketing procurement or a marketing person go into procurement?"  There is no clear answer but it’s an interesting debate. 

Finally, here’s where procurement reports: (percentages add to greater than 100% due to multiple reporting structures):
    Supply Chain Management or Strategic Sourcing: 38%
    Finance or Accounting: 30%
    Stand-Alone Purchasing or Procurement Group: 20%
    Advertising, Marketing and/or Marketing Communications: 12%
    Operations: 8%
    Corporate Services: 7%
    Other Groups: 3%

Stay tuned as there’s more to come!