Can marketers, their agencies and procurement people ever really be friends?

Is it possible to sustain this sense of idealism in a system of procurement that is currently set-up to be (sadly) adversarial at its heart? Thomas refers to the procurement officer's role to be "looking at how marketing gets a return on investment and how that is measured". Ultimately, the prevailing industry procurement model almost always means getting more agency time (and in turn ROI-based work) for less money invested.

Don't get me wrong, I admire procurement officers, they are the guard dogs that ensure their brand's money is not frittered away, with no clear return. They are often the ones having difficult conversations with agencies, so the marketing managers do not have to. This is because your average procurement officer normally possesses solicitor-like qualities: they are level-headed, with great attention to detail and a firm but fair manner.

However, what they are not normally employed to be are the best qualified judges of the more creative forms of marketing ROI, nor are they truly incentivised to look at the type of brand ROI that can be delivered beyond the length of an agency's year-long contract. Procurement officers on one side and those proposing the budgets on the agency side are normally operating based on a completely different set of parameters, with the marketing manager somewhere in the middle. So with all the goodwill in the world, it is hard to find a mutually beneficial agreement without ripping up the current way of doing things.

The current concern of procurement, from small brands to the largest brands in the world, tend to be with the cost per hour and the number of billable hours; and the agency’s concern is with getting the scope of work fulfilled or “job” done in a way that will create strong enough results for the client to keep employing them year after year or project after project, for a worthwhile price.

The current way procurement and agencies come to an agreement is confrontational: entirely focused on placing an agency rate card against how long each person on the rate card will take to complete the proposed work. The procurement officer then argues that each item of activity will take less time than the agency proposes it will take and therefore the proposed overall price needs to come down. If this fails to result in a conclusion, both agency and client will try and erode the mandate of the scope of work to justify or create the lower price. Then against this lower price are higher KPIs than the agency initially proposed, which can either be argued against or accepted.

How in this current plaintive versus defendant set-up can the commendable vision outlined by Marks & Spencer's head of procurement Claire Thomas, that procurement should act as a "neutral party between agencies and marketing which allows both parties 'to vent'", be brought to fruition, I wonder?

At the heart of the problem is the fact that procurement is dealing with the 'billable hour', when the billable hours are less and less useful for modern marketing agencies, and the focus on them involves this inherently confrontational haggling over hours here and hours there. Industry leaders such as Dormer's Coca-Cola and Proctor and Gamble have moved to the value-based billing model, entirely replacing hourly rate proposals. This value-based model involves the agency saying from experience how much it believes work will cost (rather than by the hour) and also factoring in the value the work will bring to your business.

I like Proxima's John Butcher's call 'to work with [procurement], not against us', but that may involve pulling apart the current system and starting again, in order to explore the real value in elements, most of which can't be neatly ROI'd.

Most often, the value of a marketing agency's work can only truly be measured in hindsight, but this requires the procurement officer to join the marketer in a more faith-based form of marketing investment for the course of a project or for a number of years. There is currently no ROI model for investing money in marketing based on trust and belief in the quality of the agency to deliver against overall brand objectives.

The real answer is to create a whole new "procurement" system. One that doesn't increasingly ask procurement officers, who are already talented at assessing so many matters relating to contracting, financials and legal considerations, to now become all things to all men - including creative flag-wavers for agencies - in order to get the best outcomes. The future should not just be increasing usage of a value-based billing system, but possibly something even more radical.

Jono Marcus is partner & digital director at creative marketing agency Inkling. He has guided some of the biggest brands in the world, including developing iconic digital campaigns for P&G, Unilever and IKEA. He has also invented online measurement tools, now used by major global brands to evaluate their performance.