When marketing agencies apply to do a project for a company or government department, take part in a tender or get to the stage of costing out a campaign, they run up against the biggest pitfall in every medium to large-scale project: their client’s procurement department.

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.