MMC’s Broderick tells advertisers to focus on value and transparency in hard-hitting address

The marketing procurement community needs to spend more time focussing on media and marketing effectiveness Stephen Broderick (below), senior partner of Media Marketing Compliance told the US ProcureCon Marketing 2022 conference last week.

In his opening remarks Broderick said that ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) is becoming a key agenda item alongside the ‘ole’ favourite “How can marketing and procurement work better together?”

But while these topics are vitally important they are simply contributors to ensuring marketing budgets are spent effectively to drive effective business strategies.

Broderick quoted media guru Nick Manning’s dictum that “the purpose of marketing communications is to drive business growth and you cannot be truly effective across your channels if you cannot measure effectiveness accurately, and to measure effectiveness accurately you need to track the money and the data together.” In a world rampant with ad fraud, one without the other just doesn’t work and the key driver to effectiveness is full transparency in the supply chain.

Broderick went on to highlight the delays the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and other organisations have encountered in their fight for transparency, saying: ” the current ANA transparency project is proof of how difficult it is to overcome the obstacles put in its way – if the ANA is struggling to get the access it needs, it makes it even more important that you as advertisers are also pushing in the same direction.”

Broderick observed that if he had been standing here 10 years previously, “and announced that in 10 years’ time, you as advertisers wouldn’t know the cost of your media while your agency has no obligation to tell you the cost because they are the ones selling it to you via their own inventory deals, very few of you as procurement professionals would have believed me or accepted it.

“If I stood here 10 years ago and told you that your agencies would only sell you the best priced media if you agreed to waive all your rights to see the cost of that media, very few of you as procurement professionals would have believed me or accepted it.

“If I stood here 10 years ago and told you that your agencies would have encouraged the whole industry to spend well over 60% of your total media online without robust and accurate checks and balances in place, you as procurement professionals probably wouldn’t have believed me or allowed it.

“Yet, here we are…we find ourselves with limited transparency into the finance and data supply chain – the two key areas identified as being vital to being able to measure effectiveness.”

Broderick said he believed is the agency should be fairly rewarded by its clients and asked delegates to pay their agencies properly and give them opportunities for upsides. But he noted that while agencies are rightfully making money today, the issue, is that the advertisers do not know how, where and from whom.

Summarising, Broderick stated the marketing procurement community has a key role to play and needs to get involved in the conversations that tackle real and current problems – take control, understand and challenge each of the steps in the marketing supply chain and help industry bodies like the ANA and WFA help advertisers.

Stephen Broderick is senior partner of https://www.mediamarketingcompliance.com/.