Marketing wants speed. Procurement wants savings. One system can serve both.

Written by Mick Entwisle, CEO and Co-founder

Inside most enterprise brands, marketing and procurement are pulling in opposite directions, and the objectives of both need to be met.

Marketing needs speed, flexible capacity, specialist skills and creative diversity. Content demands keep climbing across more channels and formats and budgets aren't climbing with them. The increasing breadth of work needs capabilities no fixed team or single roster can hold: social-first creators one week, a production company in another market the next, a big campaignable idea the week after.

Procurement is measured on a different scorecard. Cost savings, supplier consolidation, risk and compliance. And procurement teams are stretched thin themselves, with workloads growing far faster than headcount. Every new supplier request lands on a long queue, and every onboarding means contracts, compliance checks, payment setup and system admin.

Both sets of objectives can’t be compromised. Traditional models force them to trade off against each other.

The tension is growing

The pressure is measurable on both sides of the fence.

Marketing budgets have declined to 7.7% of company revenue, down from 9.5% three years earlier, according to Gartner's latest CMO Spend Survey. Efficiency is now a core operating condition of every marketing team.

And procurement's attention is shifting to exactly the categories marketers care most about. In the WFA's global study of marketing procurement leaders (51 executives overseeing US$114 billion in annual marketing spend), creative and production are the fastest-growing savings targets: creative nearly doubled as a focus area year on year, and production more than doubled. Half of those procurement teams carry savings targets of 7% or more.

The same study shows why the relationship strains. Only around half of procurement leaders believe the people setting their targets have good knowledge of marketing. Targets set without marketing context produce blunt outcomes: rosters shaped around cost rather than capability, and value measured only in what was saved instead of what was made.

There’s a new creative world

Here's the structural problem underneath it all. The world's creative talent has moved out of holding companies and formed a huge, growing pool of fragmented independent creative businesses, studios and creators. That's where the specialist skills, the cultural insight and the platform-native craft now live. It represents unlimited creative potential and it's the talent pool marketing needs to reach.

Procurement is heading the other way, consolidating supplier rosters to reduce risk, admin and cost. Onboarding one new supplier is a project; onboarding dozens of independents a year is unworkable. IHALC's benchmarking found 57% of in-house agencies have difficulty accessing freelance talent when they need it, and the blocker is rarely the talent. It's the internal process.

So marketers need to work around the system, or give up on the best-fit partner and settle for whoever's already on the roster. The model saves cost through one lens, but sacrifices value, effectiveness and growth.

It needs a new operating system

The tension and misalignment require a new approach. An integrated system that’s built to deliver on the objectives of both marketing and procurement.

Genero connects brands to the new independent creative world through one intelligent platform, so both teams meet their objectives without the trade-offs.

Marketing gets the talent access: a curated global network of independent creative businesses, talent and social creators, in every capability and market, matched to each brief. Specialist skills on demand, capacity that scales with the work, and genuine creative choice instead of whoever was available.

Procurement gets one supplier. One contract, one onboarding, one commercial relationship. Every engagement inside it runs through the same system: transparent briefs and budgets, consistent contracts and talent releases, centralised payments and a full audit trail. Brands can even bring their own suppliers onto the platform and manage, contract and pay them through the same workflow.

Creative firepower for marketing. A single system for procurement. Savings that come from removing friction, admin and duplication across the process, rather than from squeezing the work itself.

Shared goals, shared system

Marketing and procurement can sometimes speak different languages but the goals should be the same. Quality creative, produced at the pace the channels demand, without the layers of cost that add nothing to the work.

What’s needed is a system that delivers the right balance of efficiency and effectiveness. To replace trade-offs and tension with shared goals and a shared vision.

If your marketing and procurement teams feel stuck negotiating the trade-off, get in touch.