Quite rightly, this did not go down well with many people. Unite Union-leader Len McCluskey and new peer Doreen Lawrence said that the messages on vans were hateful and involved racial profiling. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, called them ‘stupid’ and ‘offensive’. Even the UKIP leader Nigel Farage condemned the vans saying they were ‘not the British way’.

But I disagree with LibDem-leader Nick Clegg when he says that the vans were ‘driving aimlessly around North London’ and that they are ‘not a very clever way’ of tackling the issue.

We need to put this in context. The Conservative Party has had a pretty bad year when it comes to the issue of immigration. UKIP thrashed the Conservatives in the local council elections in March partly due to the Tories’ inability to address people’s concerns about immigration. Nigel Farage, the self-styled man of the people, has been on every TV news programme and every newspaper giving the British voters a clear, strong line on immigration. David Cameron and the Tory leadership has kept a dignified near-silence. Until now.

Enter the immigration vans. Every media outlet picked up on the story. Shots of the van, along with a direct call to action text number were, and still are, in all major newspapers. The coverage has spread to TV and Radio. Even the Nation’s favourite chat show –  ITV Daybreak – ran the story.

Is it possible that the Home Office has taken a small budget and generated, via a controversial ambush marketing campaign, huge amounts of publicity on purpose? I believe so.

The voting public now know that The Home Office is serious about waging war on immigration and the Conservative Party didn’t have to pay for a 10m door drop, nor an expensive TV ad campaign. They didn’t need a trendy celebrity spokesperson nor the latest background track from a number one seller.

The Home Office paid for six vans to travel around a tiny area of London for one week only.  My guess is the whole campaign cost less than £20,000 – reportedly just £10,000 – and took two weeks to devise and implement. Yet this campaign has generated millions of pounds worth of coverage.

Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryan Air, recently said in an interview with Marketing Week that he loved all his negative publicity as it put ‘bums on his seats’. Benetton shot to global fame with their risqué ads.

Could it be that our Home Office, which we believe to be filled with stuffed shirts and box tickers, decided to outwit us all? Call the media’s bluff?  I can imagine the conversations around The Home Office table: “It’s controversial sir, but I guarantee it’ll get the Nation talking!’ And it certainly did.

The post Immigration ‘Go Home’ vans – Shockingly Racist and a Brilliant Piece of Marketing appeared first on Debbie Simmons.

Procurement departments now rule the roost when negotiating agency fees. Their overarching objective is to decrease the agency fee and hence dictate the structure of the team on the project; they usually have no real understanding of what a marketing project entails and they are concentrating purely on outlay not on results.

The poor old marketing agency feels they have little choice but to reduce fees and cut the scope of work so as to remain profitable – and secure the work. However the work taken away from the agency still has to be carried out and 9 times out of ten these jobs are picked up by the company’s brand manager.

The in-house brand manager may have little or no experience of managing the different aspects of a complicated marketing project. One person in a company, or even a small team of in-house people, can’t possibly be expert in all the aspects including web build, sourcing, terms and conditions, legal contracts, print specification, consumer messaging etc. That’s why they need to get an agency in the first place.

Agencies on the other hand have years of experience managing all the elements of the marketing mix and would be able to control and add value to all the things that have had to be picked up by the brand manager.

So the brand manager struggles under the weight of the ‘new’ role; the project loses consistency, mistakes are made, quality is foregone and the whole campaign is compromised.

So it ends up as a lose/lose, when it could so easily, for a few extra quid, have been a huge win/win for everyone. What a damn shame.

The post The pitfalls of procurement appeared first on Debbie Simmons.