Are PR agencies right to feel anxious about dealing with procurement?
My experience working with the PR agencies that partner with GSK makes me question that they do ‘feel anxious’. Procurement is there to facilitate the relationship between the client and the agency, and the agencies we work with genuinely seem to appreciate that. – What is more important – an agency’s fees or its creativity? It depends entirely on the activity. If it is a standard activity with well-established specification and can be easily commoditised, then fee becomes very important. If, on the other hand, it is a more complex activity that requires more strategic thought and creativity, then cost is the less important factor by far. – Is procurement really able to accurately value a people-based industry, in the same way it values, for example, stationery? Procurement can establish the cost of people through access to labour indices, average salaries, market rates for agency roles, benchmarking data etc. Where there is more debate is around the time required to deliver an activit
