Purchasing is Killing Your Marketing

Let’s say you work at a large organization — a government agency, a hospital, a university, a research lab, a social services NGO — and you’ve been tasked with increasing the amount of eyeballs on the great work that organization does. You know you need better creative, and you'd really like to hire someone to make it: a more attractive website, a great social media campaign, maybe even a podcast. You may understand your challenges very well, and even — huzzah! —have enough money in your budget to hire someone to solve them. Unfortunately, there is a large and challenging obstacle in your way: to hire someone, you’ll need to go through the procurement department. This is a mountain so high and steep that it can be almost impossible to climb, and innumerable winning brand strategies have been left to perish on its bleak and winding pathways.

This is not to say that procurement is trying to do wrong. The goal of a purchasing department is simple and admirable: to save money. But to do it, they have put their faith in a tool that is completely poisonous to the acquisition of quality creative work: the Request for Proposal.

“But wait!”, you may very well be shouting, “RFPs may be tedious and time-consuming, but they are the most efficient and even-handed way to choose a service provider”. This is the long-standing standing orthodox gospel of procurement. At the risk of heresy, I am here to disagree. 

If you’ve used an RFP process to hire creative services, your organization has suffered for it. You have hired the wrong people to do the wrong work at the wrong price, and you will do it again. 

This is not just because of badly-written or poorly-distributed RFPs (although almost all RFPs are badly written and poorly distributed), but because of fundamental flaws in the system itself. The RFP system was built around a particular philosophy of purchasing: that spending money must be unemotional and adversarial. Your staff are easily confused and corrupted, and therefore they cannot be trusted to make decisions, and the contractors they are interacting with are sharks, swimming around them hungrily. 

This is a belief that becomes more and more firmly held the larger an organization gets. I mean, who even are all these people who work here? We, the powers that be, have never even met most of them. We’re supposed to trust them to make choices? About spending money? Preposterous! This is particularly true when it comes to something as squirrely and bookkeeping-resistant as hiring creatives. Paying people to think? To draw? To come up with ideas? With hogwash like that on the table we have to do everything we can to prevent the gullible members of our staff from being hornswaggled by con artists. Surely, there is no sensible path except very clear, and immutable methods and rules for choosing vendors, based on sensible and unemotional criteria. Therefore, the perfect method for choosing what to buy and from whom is by comparing columns of numbers: “Firm A provides item X for price Y; Firm B provides item X for price Z ”.  For an organization to be sure of maximum value for money, this philosophy teaches, all decision-making must be brought as close as possible to this Platonic ideal.  

This is an attractive philosophy because it creates a process, and large organizations love a process. A process means order, clarity, and consistency. It means that things will get done in a methodical way no matter who is doing them. It may very well seem to be the thin red tape holding your massive team from running in 500 directions at once. 

The only problem is that it doesn’t work. 

Or rather, it works only occasionally, and only in very specific circumstances. For emotionless column-comparing to yield the best purchasing choice, your in-house team must have the expertise to know exactly which goods and services you need to buy, and more-or-less identical versions of these goods and services must be available from multiple sources. If, at any point, you are forced to compare apples and oranges, these comparisons quickly become too complex to be useful. And so, the RFP process often goes to ridiculous lengths to force oranges into something vaguely apple-shaped.  

The system falls apart completely when what you need to purchase is knowledge.  Expertise is not a commodity. It can’t be weighed or measured. It can’t be ordered in bulk. It can’t be sold by the pound. It is also not interchangeable. It’s impossible to buy the same expertise from two different experts. 

Creative services present an even greater challenge, because when you’re working with practitioners who really know what they’re doing, final pricing and timeline will come only after an initial discovery phase. This is crucial, because it’s impossible to know exactly what something will cost until we know exactly what it is, and we can’t know that until we’ve made a careful, thorough, expert-level assessment of everything it needs to accomplish. We have to ask questions, do research, and challenge assumptions. This initial creative work — the diagnosis, if you will — is what separates a successful project from an unsuccessful one. And so, by definition, a process that forces a firm plan, price, and timeline to be locked in before any work begins is going to lead to cut corners and missed opportunities.

And so, purchasing departments are designed to hire vendors, not experts, and they know it. This puts them into a state of abject terror when it comes to buying creative services. They are tasked with shoving a square peg into a round hole, and being responsible for the failure when it doesn’t fit. So what do they do? Invariably, they try to protect themselves by piling on the complications. The goal of the people composing the RFP becomes not to find the best expert, but to make the RFP so byzantine and full of cover-your-backside codicils and subsections that, were the project to go south, no one could ever possibly accuse them of having been less than thorough. This can go one of two ways: the no-detail RFP or the wrong-detail RFP.

With a no-detail RFP, the codicils and appendices have taken over completely: page after page after page of proofs of authorized registration and notarized certifications of intent to comply, leaving no room to actually describe the work to be done in any meaningful way. In my field of branded podcast production, this might end up with a single sentence that says “quote your best price to produce a weekly podcast series” on page 12 of 80, with the rest entirely filled with things like (and this is an actual example) an affidavit declaring I have no intention to buy industrial manufacturing supplies from the Republican Guard of Iraq. The idea seems to be to weed out potential awardees by making the application process so tedious that only one or two firms will actually bother to complete it. 

Wrong-detail RFPs, by contrast, are all about proxies. They are full of questions and demands that attempt to substitute something clear and quantifiable — “what equipment will you use” is a popular one – for the real, unquantifiable, question that they don’t know how to ask, which is “do you actually know what you’re doing?” “Video must be shot on a late-model single lens reflex camera with a variety of zoom and prime lenses…”, it might read “...and edited in Adobe Premiere version 8.0 or later…” and so on. This sounds comfortingly professional, but is actually just silliness. When booking a caterer, would you insist that they cut the vegetables with a certain kind of knife? Or roast them in a particular brand of oven? Of course not. Why would you care? And honestly, the people who wrote that RFP don’t care either. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they don’t even know what a single lens reflex camera is. It’s an almost arbitrary proxy, and a particularly lousy one — plenty of people have all the equipment in the world and no idea what to do with it. I have often responded to an RFP like this, dutifully filling in page after page of pinpoint detail, and submitted it with the dark knowledge in my stomach that it contains every possible piece of information except any of the ones they would need to make a good choice. 

Even with the very best-considered and best-written RFPs for creative services, the nature of the process stands in the way of success. The people writing it know that their problem must be diagnosed before it can be solved, and that pricing cannot come before diagnosis, so the only solution is to make the diagnosis themselves. This yields an RFP with very specific parameters: “The selected firm will produce a ten-episode podcast series on the subject of inspiring successes in international logistics, featuring interviews with leaders in the field conducted by our Director of Marketing, recorded remotely over Riverside or a similar video conferencing platform, edited for content and clarity, and then published via a dedicated RSS feed to all important podcast apps”. 

This might seem clear and competent, until you realize that it puts the goalposts in the wrong place. Are you really hiring an agency because you want that particular plan executed? Wasn’t it because you wanted more eyes and ears on the excellent work your organization does? Someone has created a strategy for achieving this, but that person isn’t an expert, or you wouldn’t have needed an outside provider in the first place. There might be a different concept or format that would yield significantly better results, and the firm you hire (or a different one) might have been able to produce it for you for the same price (or less). But you’ll never know. You’re locked in to executing a strategy created by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, because the process gave you no other choice. 

So what is to be done? Well, imagine this: what if, instead of trying to buy creativity like you’re buying reams of paper or boxes of drywall screws, you hired creative firms like you hire key employees? Write a job spec, and solicit applications. Look at resumes and cover letters to find the handful of companies that seem to have the closest experience and best short narrative of why they would like the gig. Then interview them — ask questions, and let them ask you questions. Allow them to present things in the way that they think is logical, and be open to potential solutions you hadn’t considered.

Then, choose. Rank the top three, based on a combination of proven experience, their understanding of the problem, and the amount you are inspired by the conversation you had. Congratulate the top firm, and send them to procurement for onboarding. If an affidavit about their disinclination to use Iraqi war surplus sheet metal when designing your website is really a crucial piece of compliance, they will be happy to sign it then, and surely you didn’t really need that document from the thirty firms you aren’t hiring. And what if they wash out? There’s some crucial legal or logistical hurdle they cannot clear? Very well, move on to choice number two. 

And also – and this is really important – be open to beginning a new engagement with an organized, paid discovery period before the work begins in earnest. We insist on this whenever possible, because it allows us to really do diagnosis, to only present a final strategy and budget after we’ve had the chance to deeply understand the problem, and therefore be confident we are presenting the right solution. And what if you don’t like the plan they present at the end of discovery? Or can’t come to terms on a final budget? Move on. Wouldn’t it be better to shift gears after a two or three month discovery phase than after a full year of delivery that wasn’t set up for success?

Maybe the main theme here is removing the idea that purchasing has to be adversarial. Too often, the highly formalized RFP system pits departments against each other: programming trying to accomplish a task, contractors eager to help them but kept at arms length, and purchasing sitting in the middle like an angry babysitter, assuming they are both trying to get away with something. Yes, you have to have compliance standards, and they have to be strict, and your staff and your contractors should absolutely be called upon to justify the ROI of the things they want to do, but please make sure your process isn’t standing in the way of actually getting what you need.