Dan Gee of Media Futures Market looks at why media procurement really matters, and why some buying is still ‘all hat, no cattle’...

Cannes is a trade fair for marketers. A very glamorous one, admittedly. Plenty of rosé, beach adjacent, sunglasses, and espadrilles all along the Croisette. But still, fundamentally, a trade fair.

People go to sell, to buy, to compare, to find partners, to launch products, to defend budgets, and to work out where the money is moving next. Which makes it slightly odd that media agencies are still so uncomfortable with the language of procurement. They work in procurement. They just don’t like admitting it. After all, a large part of the job is helping clients buy better. Better placements, better attention, better context, better outcomes, and better value for every pound invested.

That does not mean reducing media to a spreadsheet exercise in buying rectangles at the lowest possible price.

A TV spot is not just thirty seconds. An outdoor site is not just a rectangle by a road. A press ad is not just paper and ink. A digital impression is not just an available box served to an available user. Each one carries context, attention, credibility, timing, creative fit, signalling value, and the ability (or inability) to move people. An awful lot don't get seen by people at all, but that's a whole other article. 

Media is not valuable simply because it is delivered. It is valuable because it has the power to carry an idea into the world with enough force, frequency, and relevance to make a brand more visible, more memorable, more trusted and.... ding, ding, ding, more likely to be chosen.

The job of a media agency is to activate one of the most powerful growth levers a business has. Good procurement should help that happen. It should challenge waste, expose opacity, interrogate incentives, and make sure clients understand what they are really buying. It should demand clarity on cost, quality, supply chain, suitability, and intended effect. But it should also recognise that the cheapest route to exposure is not necessarily the strongest route to growth.

Some media looks good in a spreadsheet and does very little in the market. It is all hat and no cattle: plenty of apparent scale and efficiency, but not enough genuine attention, memory or commercial movement. And that matters now more than ever. Too much marketing investment is currently being pulled towards channels built for demand capture: the places closest to the transaction, closest to the click, closest to the last measurable action. These channels often race to claim a stake in attribution, presenting themselves as the source of growth when they may simply be harvesting demand created elsewhere.

In that environment, brilliant procurement can be a point of difference. A thought partner for marketers that is comfortable paying for expertise, that asks the right questions about the media being bought.   

Maybe this week in the South of France is as good a time as any to start asking some of those questions. And no, "fancy a rosé?" doesn't count.