Understanding Procurement and the Opportunities It Offers

One of our objectives for 2018 is to help our members understand procurement better and the opportunities it offers for more work.

Our first step was a presentation, last week, to procurement executives from 30 major brands, including British Airways, Apple, Axa, Virgin Atlantic and BT. All of whom are members of the CIPS (Chartered Institute of Procurement Supply) marketing group, organised with the group’s chairperson, Tina Fegent.

This enabled us to explain the value of what our members do to the group and, in particular:

• They have the best production, editing and VFX companies in the world on their doorstep.
• That the market is the guarantee of best value because three expert companies will fight for the work on expertise and price.
• That the best directing and production talent is in independent production companies.
• That great commercials can be made for a range of different prices and why.
• That expert buyers get the best value – they have traditionally been agency producers but now clients need that knowledge to decide who is best to do each part of their marketing and manage them.
• That we are responding to the need for more content at a lower cost in a variety of very inventive ways.
• That it is up to them how they spend their money but they should be wary of a perversion of completion. Production companies here won’t compete against in-house companies here because of it – a competition with an in-house bidder in it would mislead clients by making the bid appear to be a completion when in fact one of the bidders was able to control the flow of information to other bidders.
• We asked them to ask one question of their agency if they suggested using in-house: “Why would that be better for me than three companies fighting for my work, on expertise and price, on the open market?”

Our next step is to invite procurement people from brands to present to our members on their objectives and methods so that our members can understand how to connect with procurement to win more work – when pitching through agencies or working direct-to-client – we will send you a date for that soon.

Check out the CIPS report HERE