Will Procurement eat marketing's lunch?

On Tuesday this week, I was lucky enough to briefly present at this weeks Marketing and Purchasing Conference organised by the Chartered Institute of Procurement (CIPS). I was invited to speak by Prof Robert Shaw from Cass Business School and the subject was "how we measure marketing effectiveness".

What was interesting was that the "we" in the question involved the procurement teams as well as the marketing and agency teams. For many larger organisations, this makes tremendous sense. What was especially interesting for me was to see that so many procurement professionals were clearly being challenged to assess the question of "what was returned" as opposed to just "what was spent" and it seemed like well established practice for many.

Of course, the reaction wasn't homogeneous and the audience appeared to divide into two groups. The first group knew that were only interested in focusing on cost control - even if they acknowledged that this was only 1/2 the story. The second group were open to looking at accountability but appeared to lack the tools or training to do so (bingo). What was clear was that the procurement function had lot's of tools and discipline to bring to the marketing function and this left many wondering whether the future of internal marketing teams was as a smaller coordinator of effort rather than as the owner of all marketing services for an organisation.

Another interesting discussion was the perennial one about over reliance on historic marketing assessment at the expense of creativity over future campaigns - clearly the agencies don't want to loose their creative authority. However the value of measurement may often be about measuring just how bad things are. There's no need to throw ones self over a cliff to prove gravity and the same is true in marketing. You don't have to spend fortunes to work out whether a message is having an impact.

Just back from the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference in London

I'm just back from the snappily titled Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference here in London and I have to say that I was very disappointed at the range of exhibitors who were present at the event. My overall impression was that the range of visitors ranged from "e-mail optimisers" to "direct mail optimisers" and little in between. From my point of view, i had hoped that some of the broader technologies would be on show - where were Clearchannel, DDS and others who appreciate that "marketing" is a broader church than just anything containing 0's and 1's?

Having said this, there were some highlights which made attendance worthwhile for me:

1. the Google University - a good introduction to Google Adwords which was well received by all present. The funny aspect of the presentation was watching tech specialists struggling to get a projector and laptop to work together which shows it happens to all sorts of organisations.
2. the keynote speech on web 2.0 - i couldn't actually get into this so am taking a punt but the fact that almost everyone wanted to see this speech showed how important this new trend is for the industry.
3. a company new to me called Apteco and their FastStats product which had some interesting graphics to help cut through data clutter and what looks to be a solid offering with a good graphical interface.

Whilst i was initially disappointed that no exhibitor that i could find took a broader approach to what marketing means, i was also heartened to see how many people attended the event. Assuming all goes well with our new business, we shall endeavour to attend this event and show people another side of marketing.