Adidas marketing procurement director: ‘We need to help agencies deliver good work’
Procurement and advertising agencies don’t always see eye-to-eye but the former can deliver more than just knock-down fees if it pulls in the same direction as marketing executives, according to Adidas’ marketing procurement director.
Adidas marketing procurement boss: ‘We need to help agencies deliver good work’.
“We need to help agencies deliver good work,” explained Philipp Schuster of his role at the sportswear brand. Speaking at an Oystercatchers event earlier this month, the marketer said he tries to give a pitch as “much flexibility as it needs,” dispelling suggestions that unlike what many think of other procurement directors, he is more concerned with value of an agency rather the price.
Flexibility is key here because Adidas seeks to have long-term relationships with its agencies, especially with its strategic advertising partners but realizes that there is an increase in assignments on a project basis, especially for specific and unique scopes in certain niche areas. And while some will view this as a precursor to the death of marketing creativity, Schuster believes it can deliver better value for all parties because he and the brand’s marketers aren’t in conflict.
“We adapt the Adidas process to the brief and the agency because we want the agency to deliver the best work,” he added.
"We aim for a consistent process but we're willing to adapt on a case by case basis to meet the demand of that specific brief...What’s even more important in the process is that the roles and the responsibilities have to be clear between all the parties on the client side about who is charge and who will make the decision.”
Schuster and his peers are often viewed by agencies as the faceless individuals responsible for squeezing their margins, pushing them to do more for less. Consequently, procurement has been much maligned, with PepsiCo going so far as to scrap the discipline earlier last year in favour of giving its marketers control over budgets. The issue it would seem is one of education, with observers claiming that marketing procurement works best when those in the role understand the brand’s objective and work to secure fair value.
This point was further fleshed out by John Lewis’ marketing boss Craig Inglis last year when he argued that a procurement team needs marketing specialists. He added that those that do understand the “subtleties” of the function and know that “relationships are important, that creative output is not a formula and therefore the relationships can be formulaic”.