Pulling Up a Chair: How Marketing Procurement Can Own Its Seat at the Media Table.
In today’s rapidly evolving marketing landscape, media spending often constitutes 60–70% of a brand’s budget, making media procurement an essential area for delivering significant organizational value. Yet, procurement professionals often face hurdles in gaining a meaningful seat at this strategic table. At a recent expert panel, industry veterans from RAUS Global, Media Marketing Compliance and ECI Media Management shared insights on not only securing that seat but also maximizing its impact beyond mere cost savings. The panel was moderated by Libra Balian, Director at AlixPartners.
Understanding the Importance of Media Procurement
Fiona Foy, Senior Partner at Media Marketing Compliance, emphasizes media as a prime area for procurement professionals to add substantial value. With her experience in global media procurement at Vodafone, Fiona highlights the strategic importance of this role, noting, “Media is the one category it is easier to get a seat at the table because it’s typically the largest spend category in an organization. It is more commoditized than other marketing categories and it has measurable metrics — not only hard-dollar savings but also qualitative value.”
Yet, gaining a seat isn’t instantaneous. Fiona stresses, “It’s not an overnight job to build a relationship with marketing and the media team — it takes time. You can’t just walk into a room and expect to lead the category as you would in other direct or even indirect categories. The media team will instantly push back — and rightly so”. The panel focused on education and shared that you must prove your worth with your media stakeholders. You can do this by asking if you can join the weekly/ monthly staff meetings. Once you better understand the team’s dynamics and what their goals are, you can demonstrate your value incrementally by, for example, setting up vendor meetings with players in an area that the media team seeks knowledge in. You can do preliminary research around a topic, using both industry associations, such as Association of National Advertisers (ANA) or your own research, through ChatGPT or other AI tools. Libra says, “leveraging vendors to educate you within category, a field or product is helpful for both sides and should be one of your most frequent tools to learn the business”.
Own the Contract during the Entire Term
Many of us have who have been through a long, dragged-out Master Service Agreement (MSA) negotiation knows that when the dotted line is finally signed, it is very tempting to just put the agreement in the “metaphorical” drawer and forget about it. If your role is marketing procurement, you do not have this luxury! The MSA is a highly dynamic guide to your entire agency relationship, starting with rules of engagement, definitions, commercial clauses and legal clauses. An MSA should be updated annually. Our industry is in constant flux and rules around programmatic buying, principal media and artificial intelligence changes almost daily. It is equally important to manage the rest of the pages that are part of the MSA — the Scope of Work, annual or project based, the exhibits, the company policies, DEI and ESG reporting to name a few. Christine Moore, Managing Partner of RAUS Global says “managing the agency contract is a full-time job. Partnering with your colleagues in finance, legal and marketing is part of being successful in the role of marketing procurement”.
We often see outdated MSAs and other contracts where the client believe they have “full transparency”, only to realize that some of the key transparency clauses are stuck in the past and new areas cannot be verified. When working with marketing procurement, Christine often starts a client relationship with suggesting a contractual/ financial audit. “A contractual audit is like a “State of the Union” — it provides you with facts about how strong your contract is, how much trust and transparency there is in the relationship, if there are areas that need to be improved and it can also help validate your remuneration structure, media payment terms etc.”, Christine says. Once you understand the issue, you can develop a plan to fix these issues.
In addition to this start phase, it is important that marketing procurement is involved in the Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with key agency relationships. In these meetings, marketing procurement should try to lead the commercial discussion, including how media is bought (programmatic, principal etc.), the staffing burn reports, project status, additional SOW expectations to name a few.
Building Essential Relationships
Christine Moore outlines critical internal partnerships that procurement must foster to succeed. “It’s essential to collaborate closely with legal, finance, and your CMO,” Christine advises. She stresses the importance of building relationships early and maintaining consistent communication. “Your CFO and legal teams must be involved from the start, not at the last minute, to avoid unnecessary roadblocks,”
Often procurement reports into Finance and or Supply Chain. In addition, Marketing Procurement is often a so called “consultative” function, where the team does not hold or manage a budget for marketing procurement projects. This means that your influencing skills become essential to be able to do your job… so being able to state your priorities and develop business cases to ensure that you achieve the funding you require — whether from marketing, finance or supply chain organizations are table stakes.
In-house legal teams are often small in terms of the workload that comes across their desks. On top of this, marketing contracts are often long, complex and hard to interpret. In many marketing contracts, there are a substantial amount of commercial clauses — payment terms, fee structure, audit rights, rebates etc. Therefore, this is an area where marketing procurement can shine — understanding the intricacies of commercial clauses that are best-in-class for each type of marketing relationship will help support legal to deliver better results faster. “Having strong relationships with external legal firms that specialize in marketing and advertising is a key to success”, says Christine. The panel agrees that Marketing procurement can become the ringleader, bringing together finance, marketing and legal to drive governance throughout the period of the contract. Christine explains. “This collaboration ensures alignment across all stakeholders and strengthens procurement’s role in strategic decision-making.”
Negotiation: Anchor High and Be Strategic
Effective procurement often hinges on advanced negotiation skills, especially in media procurement. Christine advises adopting a bold negotiation approach by always anchoring your offer high or low. She says “it’s tempting to negotiate against yourself, but let the agency push back. If you initially propose a one-year contract term (which is considered very short if you are working with an AOR), you might realistically aim for two year term. By starting low you “anchor” your position and this often leads to better outcomes for your company.” She adds, “It’s a psychological game — sit comfortably in silence after your proposal. It feels awkward but works wonders.”
Victoria Potter, of ECI Media Management, further emphasizes the importance of strategic benchmarking during negotiations. “Having industry benchmarks is critical. Without benchmarks, you’re negotiating in the dark,” Victoria advises. She recommends leveraging external resources to better understand market standards and trends, enabling informed and credible negotiations. As a rule, when you have facts that you can use as a basis for your negotiation position, the conversation changes from an opinion to a fact-based negotiation. And we all know that it is hard to argue with verified facts.
Another key point is that the negotiation does not end when the Agency and Client sign the MSA. It is a dynamic document with several additional exhibits. Marketing procurement can make sure that while the MSA isn’t re-negotiated every year, essential clauses are updated, added and even deleted through carefully thought-through addendums. This limits the risk of opening the entire MSA for renegotiation each year.
Transparency and Auditing: Critical Tools for Success
Victoria Potter of ECI Media Management underscores the necessity of transparency, particularly in programmatic media buying, which now accounts for approximately 90% of media spend. “Programmatic media buying can offer incredible targeted audience reach, but only if managed with strict guardrails,” she says. “Procurement must ensure inclusion lists, frequency caps, and clear timing plans are defined and enforced.” Christine further stresses, “This is an area that marketers often overlook. Procurement can step in, apply transparency controls, and significantly reduce waste, directly impacting the bottom line”.
Programmatic can also introduce significant inefficiencies if not carefully monitored. There’s often hidden waste in programmatic due to a lack of transparency — brands are unknowingly purchasing duplicate impressions or ineffective placements. The Association of National Advertiser’s (ANA) published a very insightful report in December 2023, and updated the report the following year. While some of the findings have been easier to implement - including limiting MFAs and move from exclusion lists to inclusion lists for websites the brand buys media on — other areas such as managing the number of steps included in a programmatic buy has been a lot harder to impact. Regular media auditing and clear guardrails that are monitored often significantly reduce this wastage, ensuring budgets are effectively utilized. Christine further emphasizes, “Procurement can step in, apply transparency controls, and significantly reduce waste, directly impacting the bottom line.”
Principal Media: Navigating Complexity
Principal media buying — where agencies purchase media in bulk and resell to clients — can offer substantial discounts but poses significant transparency challenges. Fiona advises vigilance: “Put strict guardrails in your contracts — and manage them dynamically”. It is important to understand that when agencies engage in principal media buying, (also known as proprietary media, value programs etc.) they move from being an agent to a principal. While this sounds straight forward, it means that the agency pre-buys media that it then re-sells to their clients. Some people have pointed out the inherent conflict of interest when you are both the buyer, the planner and the seller of the same media. Agencies do these types of deals and offer lower price of the media in return for less transparency around the cost of the media and well as other KPIs. Here, we are not arguing the pros and cons of principal media, however, brands need to decide if this is a way that they are willing to buy media. If this is an accepted practice, marketing procurement can take different steps to ensure that the organization is protected. For example, instituting clearly defined approval levels within the brand, potentially both finance and marketing approval if the dollar amounts are large enough, implementing limits on spending on principal media as a proportion of the quarterly or annual media spend, and guarantee transparency across all the qualitative KPIs that are in place for media buys in the contact. Regular monitoring and auditing of these agreements can prevent hidden issues. Also, it is important to know that while Agencies do offer discounted pricing through principal media, the discount is negotiable. Often the discount is offered on an annual basis, but it is a lot more lucrative to negotiate the discount more often, some clients do it quarterly, some clients do it on every deal.
Christine further elaborates on this, highlighting how easily agencies can exploit ambiguities in contracts. “If your contract is silent on principal media, agencies might leverage this, and thereby significantly reducing transparency,” she warns. Ensuring explicit terms and regular audits are critical steps to protecting your organization’s investment. Most media agencies their own name for its principal trading division. This often makes it unclear for people that are not well versed in this type of buying, and this has led to clients who think they are not buying principal media, ending up with 60 to 70% of their annual media spend in principal media. In this instance the client has no way to verify the cost of its media and thus cannot validate their competitiveness around media pricing. Considering that companies on average spend between 5% and 20% in annual marketing spend, it is a large portion of “unknown” for any company.
Staffing Plans: A Hidden Gem for Strategic Influence
Staffing plans are another critical, yet underutilized area for marketing procurement. According to Christine, these plans reveal who is actively engaged on your account, offering transparency into how your budget is actually utilized. “Even if your agreement is commission-based, demand a staffing plan,” Christine suggests. Knowing who works on your staff plan is the only way to validate if your commission rate is right for you. If you know the costs vs. what you are paying, you can start to manage the fees on an annual basis and negotiate with facts vs. just having an intuition that your commission rates are too high.
If you have a “time & materials” fee, the litmus test is to ask your marketing stakeholders if they know the people that are listed on the staff plan. Often, changes happen as people resign, are promoted or are replaced and the staff plan is not updated. If you have a reconcilable fee, marketing procurement should have an updated plan at least quarterly. “Knowing precisely who works on your account ensures you’re paying for value, not just services. Regularly reviewing this with your CMO ensures alignment and optimizes agency resource allocation” says Fiona. If agencies leave positions open for a certain time, or replace the senior person with a junior person, it should be reflected in the fee that is charged to you as a client, through a reconciliation.
Building Relationships with Your Agencies
Developing a strategic relationship with agencies is pivotal. Fiona recommends leveraging your agency for insights and knowledge. “Your agency is your friend; it’s your primary source of learning,” she states. “Don’t shy away from asking questions — even if it makes you look naive initially, it positions you advantageously in negotiations and builds deeper trust over time”. Many marketing procurement folks feel that it is is wrong to be friendly with your vendors. However, this business it is imperative to know who you are working with. Agencies often have client finance teams that work on all commercial issues with a client. This is a magnificent resource to get to know and work closely with. “We often see that marketing procurement often focus on the larger AOR relationships, which makes sense as most marketing dollars are spent on these contracts. However, you will often find that some of your smaller agency relationships can be your best friend. They are often more flexible in the way they work with your brands, and they are often more transparent and open with the client. This is not an invitation to take advantage of smaller players, it is purely an invitation to create win-win relationships with all your vendors, not just the largest ones. Fiona says, “think strategically — in the past influencer agencies were a small part of our portfolio, now they have shifted to be a much more important player, and having built a relationship before the boom is very beneficial for both parties”.
Actionable Advice for Procurement Professionals
To solidify your seat at the table, Fiona, Christine, and Victoria collectively emphasize these actionable steps:
- Get Educated and Engage: Learn about media intricacies, including programmatic buying, principal media, and staffing models.
- Develop and Leverage Internal Partnerships: Align closely with finance, legal, and marketing teams early in the procurement process.
- Own the Contract the Entire Term: Clearly define transparency expectations within contracts, especially for programmatic and principal media.
- Negotiate Strategically: Anchor your proposals high, be patient, and use benchmarks effectively.
- Regular Auditing: Employ performance auditors to ensure agencies comply with contract terms and optimize spending.
Key take-away: Embrace Your Strategic Role
Securing a seat at the media procurement table goes beyond tactical cost savings; it’s about strategic value creation, transparency, and collaboration. “Procurement professionals need to elevate beyond traditional perceptions and demonstrate strategic value,” Christine concludes. “When procurement steps into this expanded role effectively, they become indispensable drivers of marketing’s success and, by extension, critical to business growth.”
