Marketing Procurement Trends 2024

Marketing procurement teams are navigating the tension between driving cost optimization and supporting the brand’s need to stay progressive across creativity, innovation, and experience. The 2024 trends highlight how effective processes, grounded in communication, accountability, and agility, can drive change across marketing organizations. 

Key takeaways: 

• Aligning priorities is key to smarter spend: Procurement and marketing should align on what to prioritize, be it innovation, efficiency, or long-term value, to manage costs strategically. Rethinking agency models and internal structures can further unlock efficiencies. 

• Marrying marketing procurement with sustainability: Integrating sustainability into procurement involves prioritizing eco-friendly practices, including closed-loop systems in vendor agreements, and ensuring partners are held accountable through clear standards and performance measures. 

• Understanding the cost of technology: While AI is expected to drive efficiency and enhance consumer experience through data, brands often assume it will automatically lead to cost savings. However, it is important to consider the high investment and hidden costs of adoption.  

• Data maturity and literacy in marketing procurement: Technology-driven analytics and insights underpin many decisions in marketing supplier management. Overcoming data challenges is key to building a data-driven culture that transforms insights into actions and delivers measurable business value. 

Though this report is intended for stakeholders across the marketing organization, procurement teams are at the heart of the process. It equips marketing procurement professionals, who are constantly balancing innovation and cost control, with key marketing procurement trends in 2024, analysis of the landscape and challenges, and processes that can be put in place to enhance efficiency.

By fostering alignment between marketing and procurement teams to align on a range of priorities, ensuring that partners help perpetuate sustainability goals, reevaluating the martech stack in order to incorporate AI for cost savings, and ensuring that data literacy, integration, and governance are addressed in marketing procurement, brands can develop the right process to stay ahead as the marketing landscape shifts.

Report Highlights: 

• Finding the right balance between spending and saving: Think about cost management across the marketing organization through 7 approaches: eliminate, simplify, utilize, standardize, centralize, automate, and renegotiate. 

• Marrying marketing procurement and sustainability: Process evaluation and increasing sustainable options through closed-loop systems in vendor agreement while incorporating sustainability considerations into performance management. 

• Understanding the cost of technology: Evaluating whether the current marketing technology stack is underutilized, assessing the possible impact and implications of AI specific to the current stack, and understanding how AI is being used by agency partners will enable teams to better leverage their platforms for more efficiencies.  

• Ensuring data maturity and literacy: Determine the level of data literacy and maturity within the team, the wider organization, and with regards to agency partners to explore how data can be better utilized for decision-making