Pick Your Battles, My Young Sourcerer!

Andrew Tsang recently started an excellent discussion "Aligning Ad Agency and Procurement Incentives" over on LinkedIn in the Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Group. Andrew proposes that advertising is a high potential area for creating value through strategic sourcing if marketing and procurement could find a way to reconcile their apparently opposing objectives around cost reduction and revenue enhancement. I absolutely agree with Andrew.

Having provided strategic sourcing services to several clients in the marketing category I'd say one of my personal lessons learned is that there are good places and bad places to start when approaching this particular area. For example, striding into the creative area armed with a fistful of RFP templates and value-based SLA metrics is an experience that usually does not end well. One area I have found in my experience to be a sensible starting point, however, is the media buy - particularly print ads in newspapers and magazines. And I'm talking the media BUY, not the planning. Tell a marketing department that you can take their existing media buy plan for the next quarter (down to the geographic markets, specific newspaper vendors, ad specs and quantities) and help them execute that media buy at 15-20% lower cost (this is actually very possible with the state of the ad market today) then you have a chance to deliver an early win that will allow you to build a long term relationship. You haven't challenged marketing's territory around creative strategy or even advertising planning - you've helped them do what they want to do at a lower cost. Now, you may have to play hardball with an incumbent media buying agency or even bring another agency or two into the mix for the client to consider but this is nothing compared to the vertical uphill battle of even suggesting that you may be trying to tinker with the creative process.