Tying together procurement and marketing

With the aim of dispelling the criticism surrounding the procurement function in marketing organisations and highlighting its value, the World Federation of Advertisers  will launch a measurement service.The new tool will allow the WFA's members and non-members to benchmark their marketing procurement services against some of the world's largest advertisers, and focus on the benefits of collaborating with marketing teams and agency partners.Through completing an online survey, brands can test the sophistication of their procurement team. The results will provide each company with a measure of its marketing procurement maturity, assessing its current approach to management of marketing activities compared to both the ideal and current practices.It will also identify skills and resources these organisations need to develop across both marketing and procurement to improve performance in this area. The service will be launched with London-based consultancy Spire.Steve Lightfoot, senior manager, global marketing procurement, WFA said: "Our aim is to help all sourcing teams move along a maturity path to ensure that this function continues to deliver value to the business that includes, but goes beyond, cost targets."In its most recent study, the WFA surveyed more than 45 companies with a total marketing spend of around US$60bn globally, and found that the performance gap between the most and least advanced organisations is getting wider. In 2012 the bottom 25% of respondents scored 40% lower than they did in 2010. In parallel, performers in the top 25% improved by 5% on 2010.Also, the tenure of the procurement team and their integration with the marketing planning process strongly correlates with advanced performance scores. More than half of the most advanced sourcing teams have staff with a background in marketing, and with no less than five years of experience, noted the study.Commenting on the research, Paul Duxbury, co-founder at Spire said it underlines the importance of co-operation between marketing and procurement."While the lead role in areas such as managing money and finding the best agencies will naturally fall to procurement, areas such as applying best practice and introducing systematic approaches need to be driven by marketing. The most advanced organisations recognise the need for deep seated co-operation between the two functions.Previous research the WFA carried out in 2010 on the topic identified four key measures of performance - managing money tightly, identifying and working with the best suppliers, using integrated and streamlined approaches to manage marketing and developing structures for continuous improvement.