Why your procurement process might be the biggest threat to your marketing success

By Robin Scarborough, co-founder, StudioSpace

There's a simple question that is keeping a lot of marketers up at night: when the unexpected happens, can you actually move to address it, or would you be stuck spending months finding someone who knows what to do? 

This isn't a hypothetical question; it's one every marketer needs to be crystal clear on. If we've learned anything from the last few years, it's that 'unprecedented times' arrive more often than they used to, whether that's ad-effectiveness-crushing changes to algorithms, clumsily worded regulations introduced with wide-reaching consequences, or sharp shifts in what customers expect and what stretched budgets are expected to deliver.

Volatility is the new watchword, and it is making it harder to plan for many in our industry.

Compounding all of this is the fact that even the best resourced Australian marketing teams have blind spots in their capability, simply because of the complexity of the technology, regulatory and consumer landscape which exists today.

It's an anxiety-inducing time to lead a marketing function.

The roster bet stopped paying off

In the old world order, a roster built around a large agency group was a sensible bet. Whatever came up, one of its agencies probably had it covered, because between them they held most of the talent that mattered and the challenges were pretty straightforward comms or tech builds. That bet doesn't pay off the same way anymore because the major groups have reorganised themselves around the areas their commercial model works best, meaning they've stepped back from the kind of fast, specialist work that doesn't pay off for their shareholders immediately.

That means an overwhelming amount of the best talent and specialists in our industry now reside in smaller independent agencies where they can be closer to the work and the clients, as well as spend less time faffing about with internal politics. A lot of them aren't mad about it.

This is great news if you're in a business set up to move fast, procure the services you need at speed and adapt to whatever is thrown in front of you because you're able to access these people (as long as you know where to find them) in real-time.

Procurement isn't the problem

But for larger enterprises locked into those multi-year contracts with holding companies, this challenge is a genuine conundrum, because while there may be a contingency budget, there's something else standing in your way: procurement.

Mention the word to a marketing team in a hurry, and you'll watch their faces fall, but that frustration is usually aimed at the wrong target. The people who run procurement aren't the problem; the rules they've been handed are.

Those rules exist for sound governance reasons, but most were written for a world where you onboarded a handful of large suppliers once and stuck with them for years. Applied to a market where the capability you need might be something you hadn't even heard of last quarter and the best fit for it is a small, specialist business you haven't come across, the same process that protects the business also stops it moving.

The three-to-six-month gap

Onboarding a new vendor through a typical corporate procurement process takes two to three months before any actual work begins. Add the time spent finding the right specialist and getting a brief together, and the gap between "we need to respond to this" and a campaign or growth initiative actually going live stretches to three to six months.

If you start now, you might have them in place to start by January. But your problems will probably look a bit different again then.

What it looks like when it works

When you do find the right specialists, the effect is hard to overstate. We recently matched a major financial services brand with a specialist business which had AI capability so far ahead of what they'd seen that the next meeting drew 15 people from their side, many with no direct connection to the brief. They'd come to watch, because the fluency on display was something their own processes had made unreachable to them.

There is no talent shortage, but there is an access problem, and it's the same problem that decides whether a business can move when the next shift happens, whatever it turns out to be.

None of this argues for abandoning partners you've built real relationships with, but it does mean finding solutions to ensure you've built a bench of well-vetted specialist capability before you need it, rather than discovering the gap at the exact moment speed matters most.

Know who you'd call

The pattern is easy to see even when the specifics aren't. AI is changing how marketing works, regulation is tightening, and customer expectations keep resetting. Something will shift - it always does.

When it does, the businesses that cope best won't be the ones with the biggest roster. They'll be the ones who already know who they'd call.

Most marketing leaders can't yet answer that question, but it's a gap worth closing, and it won't close itself.