Why Marketing Procurement Keeps Failing

The scorecard, not the stakeholder, is where the problem starts.

Marketing remains the procurement category that defeats most playbooks. Stakeholders avoid the function. Spend resists clean classification. Traditional RFP processes feel like a foreign language imposed on creative teams that live in weeks, not quarters. And the cost-savings metric that earns finance applause loses marketing immediately. The structural mismatch has frustrated procurement leaders for years, and the latest debate makes clear it has not improved.

The conversation gained traction online after Tom Mills, a procurement expert, argued that procurement keeps blaming the marketing team when the real problem sits one level deeper. The CFO-driven scorecard, the post argued, sets procurement up to fail in this category. The fix proposed was a new measurement model built around speed-to-supplier, stakeholder NPS, marketing ROI uplift, and supplier-led innovation. The post drew CMOs, CPOs, transformation leaders, agency veterans, and former marketers who had crossed over. The agreement on the diagnosis was strong. The pushback on the prescription was sharper.

Different, Not Difficult

The most cited reframing came from Simon Frost, a sustainable procurement and category management trainer. “What one comes to realise is not that they’re difficult, it’s that they’re different. They think differently and have different objectives. Procurement will look equally and opposite different to them. But when each team understands the other’s requirements, it’s absolutely possible to have a very fruitful relationship that delivers amazing results.”