Procurement Leaders' senior staff writer Steve Hall has just written an article on how procurement executives can best influence marketing folk. He spoke to the marketing director for Premier Foods in Ireland, Ciara Dilley, who talks about the difficulty in finding good-quality marketing procurement folk - a point which is backed up by RD Squared co-founder Rosie Doggett.

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In this latest guest post, Rosie Doggett, co-founder of RD Squared, analyses the UK government Central Office of Information's ten-step process for assessing the return of investment of public-sector advertising and marketing spend.

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A guest post earlier this week, written by Ralph Daniel of Third i Marketing, points to a recent study conducted by Advertising Age magazine and how it discovered that fewer than one in ten marketing procurers have experience in marketing. It wasn’t particularly scientific work, comprising of looking through the LinkedIn profiles of marketing procurement folk. Neither did it satisfactorily address the more important question of whether marketing experience is actually something that those who buy marketing services should have. I would argue not, Advertising Age would no doubt disagree.

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A post on this blog from earlier this year looked at how procurement and advertising agendas can be aligned. It sparked a fair amount of debate and illustrated well the gap between the two. Another article has been written - this time looking into the LinkedIn profiles of marketing procurers. In this guest post, Ralph Daniel of Third i Marketing offers his thoughts.

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It would seem that marketing procurement is currently on the agenda - it wasn't too long ago that we reported on marketing agency WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell's comments on how procurement was responsible for a drop in profits at his company. So I probably shouldn't have been surprised to come across another interesting article - this time in Media Week - which ponders the troublesome question of the relationship between procurement and creatives - simplistic cost cutters versus fluffy money wasters...

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If there's one thing that has resisted the impact of procurement's influence more than most over the past few years, it's marketing spend. Still an intangible spend area in many businesses, marketing directors also enjoy a position of power, as well as a certain influence over most CEOs.

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There's an excellent article over on the US' Advertising Age about aligning the incentives between advertising agencies and procurement functions. It's one of the more grown-up commentaries about the challenges that undeniably exist in a relationship which, historically, hasn't always seen eye to eye.

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On the face of it, a good working relationship between procurement and marketing may seem unlikely. The idea of creatives buddying up with cost cutters (I'm using stereotypes here) just doesn't seem to wash. But having listened again to a presentation by Rick Hughes, the head of global purchases at Procter & Gamble, which was submitted to Procurement Leaders as part of their eventual winning entry in the Procurement Leaders Excellence Award, it seems that the two have a very close relationship at the world's largest consumer products company.

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There's a great article over on Advertising Age about how media buying agency Omnicom, one of the largest media and advertising companies in the world, is looking to procurement for help during the downturn - despite spending years complaining how procurement has harmed creativity.

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