Publicity

July 7, 2003 -- Reasons for Purchasing’s Rise in Agency Reviews Cited in Agencyfinder Report.

Agencyfinder releases executive report defining issues surrounding the increase of procurement department activity in ad agency and PR account reviews.

Richmond, VA - Agencyfinder, the most comprehensive advertising & pr agency search/selection system on the Internet, released its first Special Executive Report today entitled Why Purchasing Stalks Marketing for Agency Control. The report identifies several key issues surrounding the growing influence of purchasing departments on the agency selection process and provides some insights as to how agencies and clients can adapt.

Agencyfinder’s founder, Chuck Meyst, explains why the company went to the effort of researching and publishing on this topic: “Late last Fall, we started to see a fundamental change in who was using our service from the client side. Since that time (over the last 9 months), we’ve seen a ten-fold increase in searches from purchasing and procurement managers on behalf of their employers and brands. We started to wonder why, did our homework and now present the findings in this report.”

The report cites financial pressures and a greater desire for accountability in the marketing spend as two inter-related issues behind the growing influence of purchasing in reviews and compensation negotiations. “But there are other factors, too,” Meyst continues. “Those of us in the advertising, PR and related fields haven’t done a very good job of building trust in how we do business or how we charge for the value we bring.”

In conversations with Al Ries, author of The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR , Ries underscores the point that chemistry alone can’t win accounts anymore and that advertising agencies in particular have done a pretty miserable job of understanding that fact. “You have to have the mindset of the purchasing agent,” Mr. Ries says in the report. “Purchasing people deal in hard values; data, especially prices, terms, guarantees, etc. Advertising people deal in soft values such as creativity which can’t be measured.”

But what are the implications of this trend? The Agencyfinder report sheds light on the impact purchasing and procurement managers have had on the agency search process to-date. In the past year, clients have stepped over the unspoken boundaries of employee compensation