Get more from marketing procurement

“The WFA Sourcing Board is here to keep advancing standards and offering guidance."

Marketers, we see you. We in the marketing procurement community see you, your team and the very full agenda you maintain. We see the increasing complexity of marketing and rising budget pressure. We see how many hats you have to wear each day: strategizing with your agency in the morning, assessing plans for your tech stack over lunch and meeting with the CFO in the afternoon.

We think you could use a little help, and, as a profession, we’re eager to provide it. No, really, we mean it. We can help advance your objectives using our knowledge of the business, commercial expertise and connections in the marketplace.

We hope it’s not a surprise to hear that we are here to enable your goals. While we do have processes and requirements in the business that we need to follow, your procurement business partners want to help you navigate them for the benefit of the business. We seek to be an enabler of marketing objectives, not an impediment.

Like any other function, there is a range of maturity levels across procurement teams, but we do our best work when the standards are high. Marketing procurement has been on a development journey in recent years thanks to WFA initiatives such as Project Spring and we, the Sourcing Board, are here to keep advancing standards, offering guidance to our community that they can choose to adopt as they see fit. That community is growing all the time and we now have three new members of our Sourcing Board:

• Rachel Wentzel, Senior Director HQ Brands Procurement, adidas;
• Hannah Whittall, Global Sourcing Director Marketing Services, L'Oréal; and
• Chrissy Zhou, Senior Director, Global Media Sourcing & AMEA Marketing and Sales Sourcing, Mondelez, who will also take on the role of APAC Sourcing Chair, the first time we have had that level of regional expertise for marketing procurement.

So, in the spirit of constant improvement, we would like to share a few areas of procurement focus that might be untapped by you and your teams.

1. Resourcing your marketing initiatives

Mature procurement teams are looking for the best external skills to help you deliver your objectives, whether delivering with agencies, freelancers, technology or a combination. The Sourcing Board is currently working to advance skills within procurement. The goal is to identify and develop the unique and differentiating skills that enable us to support and keep pace with, our marketing counterparts. This includes:

• Understanding the practice of marketing to deliver value to the business e.g. data, creativity, leadership, consumer understanding, revenue generation and brand building in a fragmented world;
• Building a network, e.g. where to go for a market pulse check, seeking an agency or supplier capability and benchmarking;
• Partnering with marketing and finance in business impact discussions to connect workstreams with business outcomes; and
• Progressing the maturity of the function.

2. Helping you understand marketing spend data like no one else

Procurement sees all spending across the business. We can break it down and compare across brands, markets or agency groups, for example, to help you manage marketing investments and not simply budgets. The Sourcing Board is currently doing some voluntary work to help procurement professionals support marketing investments through category management, a strategic approach that we hope will help harmonise objectives across functions. We seek to move beyond primarily reducing cost to informing business decisions with good commercial options and ramifications of each. Like any other function, maturity matters, and mature teams have business objectives aligned with those of their stakeholders. As procurement practitioners we use a category management approach to document and align our commercial strategies to the business. That should help us provide you with expertise in the marketplace for key disciplines, competitive intelligence and innovation.

3. Cascading your efforts throughout the marketing supply chain

Procurement can champion sustainability and diversity across all disciplines – media, creative, production, events and others. As a start, procurement can bring to bear world-class practices and industry initiatives such as Planet Pledge. Because procurement works globally, it can employ consistent practices across the marketing supply chain, enabling trusted reporting and measuring impact. Upcoming work from the Sourcing Board will include both sustainability and supplier diversity guides.

4. Enabling technology such as AI for simplicity and speed of service

Currently we are testing, learning and sharing where we can apply AI to help our stakeholders, partners and leadership understand the technology for marketing procurement. This will include both internal processes and key partner relationships. WFA resources such as the GenAI Primer are recommended reading for all procurement teams supporting marketing, so we have the knowledge to seamlessly add value to the business.

Our previous workstreams included defining leading marketing procurement, proposing voluntary pathways to aligning objectives with marketing, and building out a clear budget structure with finance.

As marketing procurement leaders, we are working to high standards because we, too, represent our brand in the marketplace. We believe that we can apply our commercial expertise to an aligned set of objectives working alongside marketing.

It’s a big vision, and we ask that you also set your expectations high. Let your procurement business partner know your objectives and hold them to playing their part in business success. Everything we do as a Global Sourcing Board is designed to meet that goal.