Marketing and Procurement's Elephant in the Room: the CFO

Sitting through industry conferences run by the Association of National Advertisers and others this year, and listening to heated conversationsabout the state of relations between ad agencies and client procurement, I’ve had a nagging thought. There is one critical party missing from the discussion around the challenges we’re facing balancing value and cost. Hint: It’s that C-level executive who brought marketing and procurement together in the first place.

The driving force behind any focus on procurement is almost always the chief financial officer and the marketer’s finance department. It’s the CFO who made it a priority to aggressively tackle cost cutting to improve the bottom line, in turn putting all areas of the company’s spending — including advertising — under the microscope.

Perhaps the most glaring evidence of the broken three-way communication between finance, procurement and marketing is that it’s rare for CFOs to be fully briefed by marketing and procurement, especially with regards to the importance of investing in key agency relationships. Without this information, finance has a tendency to see savings in one dimension, that is, as funds to be taken from budgets.

Gone are the days when advertising and marketing were “hands off,” so it’s vital we all stop and rethink the role of the CFO in marketing and procurement decision making.

See full article at: Marketing and Procurement’s Elephant in the Room: the CFO – Advertising Age – Agency News.