How to Incorporate Programmatic Media Buying Into Your Procurement Strategy

The relationship between marketers, IT, and their procurement organizations has evolved, as marketing has progressed from integrating digital to becoming predominately digitally driven. Today, one of the most significantly trends affecting this dynamic is the adoption of programmatic media buying.

Defined as the automation of media buying and selling, programmatic marketing is one of the fastest growing areas of spending in many companies. The growth of spend in this area is naturally attracting a lot of attention from procurement, and without an existing best practice solution for managing programmatic, the department is poised to take a leadership role in defining the strategic approach.

Here are a few action points for incorporating programmatic buying into your procurement strategy.

Action: Establish a value-conscious approach

Getting marketing on-board with a value-based approach to integrating a developing technology can be complicated, especially without a roadmap to success and with investments in programmatic growing so quickly. Hammering out agreements on what constitutes acceptable pricing and margins can be difficult because programmatic revolves around bids as opposed to fixed prices. In addition, the goals of marketing and procurement may not always be aligned, to the point where they may even be opposed.

Action: Define metrics for cost and measuring value that procurement and marketing agree on.

The value that marketing gets out of digital activity is undeniable, but the ways that they quantify and communicate that value to procurement and other internal leadership can vary. With procurement’s focus on analytics, benchmarking value, and controlling costs, fitting programmatic into the mold used for other types of marketing spend can be a challenge.

The main benefit of programmatic marketing is simplifying the act of media buying, and the convenience that it brings to marketing. You can understand why investment in programmatic is skyrocketing. It’s this same adoption rate that makes it more difficult to reconcile with procurement, who value compliance and require time and information in order to perform their work of optimizing value for the company.

Action: Take steps to avoid fraud.

A significant part of procurement’s involvement in programmatic is their role in risk avoidance and fraud detection. In the programmatic world, getting what you are paying for is a significant area of concern.

With the click of a button, a marketer can buy the right impressions, from the right potential customers. Should you do this without proper tracking, the potential for loss due to fraud is real and significant. Procurement’s involvement will add another layer of oversight and mitigate the possibility of negative outcomes.

In conclusion & next steps

Programmatic has become a hot button topic, because of its importance to marketing, and the need for procurement to have a hand in navigating the value creation aspects of implementation. Because of this, programmatic is set to be a critical topic in the agenda of the fifth annual ProcureCon Marketing conference, taking place this November in gorgeous Los Angeles, California.

Make sure to also read the ProcureCon Marketing Agenda for other top insights and challenges facing the industry.