Media Procurement Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It

Media procurement transformation is the process of redesigning how organisations buy, govern, and evaluate media investment, shifting from cost-focused purchasing to value-focused decision-making. Done properly, it connects media buying to business outcomes rather than rate cards, and gives finance and marketing a shared language for what media is actually worth.

Most organisations are not doing it properly. They are running procurement processes designed for office supplies and applying them to one of the most complex, dynamic, and strategically consequential categories in their entire cost base.

Why Media Procurement Is a Strategic Problem, Not a Purchasing Problem

There is a version of media procurement that works well. It is rigorous, commercially sharp, and genuinely improves how marketing investment is deployed. Most organisations are not running that version. They are running a process that optimises for the wrong things, at the wrong stage, with the wrong people in the room.

I have sat on both sides of this. At iProspect, we grew from around 20 people to over 100, and a significant part of that growth came from winning pitches driven by procurement-led processes. Some of those processes were excellent. Others were elaborate theatre, designed to demonstrate due diligence rather than actually improve media outcomes. You could tell the difference within the first hour of the briefing. The good ones asked hard questions about strategy and measurement. The poor ones handed you a spreadsheet and asked you to fill in your CPM rates.

The problem is structural. Procurement teams are typically measured on cost savings. Media agencies are measured on performance metrics that are often self-reported. Finance wants a number they can benchmark. Marketing wants flexibility and speed. Nobody is naturally incentivised to ask the harder question: is this media investment actually building the business?

This is worth understanding in the context of broader go-to-market thinking. If you want to see how media decisions connect to growth strategy more broadly, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from market entry through to performance architecture.

What Does a Broken Media Procurement Process Actually Look Like?

It looks normal. That is the problem. A broken media procurement process has all the right components: an RFP, a scoring matrix, agency presentations, a governance committee, a signed contract. It looks like due diligence. It produces a winner. And then, six months into the relationship, the client wonders why nothing has really changed.

The signs are usually visible before the ink dries. The RFP focused heavily on price benchmarks and agency credentials, but asked almost nothing about how the agency would approach audience strategy or measurement methodology. The scoring matrix weighted cost at 40% and strategic thinking at 15%. The shortlisted agencies were all large enough to feel safe, which meant the process filtered out the firms most likely to challenge the status quo.

I have watched clients spend three months running a procurement process only to end up with a cheaper version of exactly what they had before. The brief was written to replace the incumbent, not to rethink the model. That is a meaningful distinction.

There is also a deeper issue around what gets measured. Most media audits are built around rate benchmarking: did you pay a competitive CPM? Did your buying costs sit within industry norms? These are not useless questions, but they are downstream of the questions that actually matter. Were you buying the right media in the first place? Was the audience targeting grounded in real commercial data? Was the channel mix built around where your customers actually are, or around where your agency has the strongest trading relationships?

Rate benchmarking tells you whether you paid a fair price for the thing you bought. It tells you nothing about whether you should have bought it.

The Performance Marketing Trap Inside Procurement Decisions

One of the more persistent distortions in media procurement is the overweighting of lower-funnel performance channels. Earlier in my career, I overvalued performance media too. It is easy to understand why. The data is clean, the attribution is (apparently) clear, and finance loves a cost-per-acquisition figure they can put in a spreadsheet.

The problem is that a significant portion of what performance media gets credited for was going to happen anyway. Someone who has already decided to buy your product will search for your brand. You will capture that conversion and attribute it to paid search. The channel looks efficient. The procurement team rewards the agency for delivering strong CPA numbers. Nobody asks whether the underlying demand was created or simply captured.

Think about how a clothes shop works. Someone who tries something on is many times more likely to buy than someone who walks past. The fitting room does not create the desire to buy, but it is a critical part of the conversion process. Performance media is often the fitting room: important, but not the thing that brought the customer through the door. If your procurement process optimises entirely for fitting room efficiency, you will eventually run out of customers to convert.

Real media procurement transformation requires organisations to build a framework that values both demand creation and demand capture, and to resist the political pressure to defund brand investment because it is harder to attribute. This is not a new argument, but it remains one of the most consistently ignored ones in procurement conversations.

Understanding how market penetration actually works is useful context here. Growth comes from reaching new audiences, not just converting the ones already in the funnel. A procurement model that concentrates spend on bottom-funnel channels is systematically underinvesting in the conditions that make bottom-funnel conversion possible.

How Transformation Actually Starts: Alignment Before Process

Most media procurement transformation programmes start with process redesign. They should start with alignment.

The question that needs to be answered before any RFP is written, before any audit is commissioned, before any agency is briefed, is this: what is media investment supposed to do for this business? Not in abstract terms. Specifically. Is it building brand preference in a category where you are the challenger? Is it driving trial among a demographic you are currently underindexing with? Is it defending market share against a new entrant? Is it supporting a geographic expansion?

Without a clear answer to that question, procurement has no basis for evaluating agency proposals beyond price and credentials. With a clear answer, you can build a scoring framework that actually reflects strategic value.

This alignment work is harder than it sounds. Marketing and finance often have fundamentally different mental models of what media is for. Finance tends to see it as a cost to be minimised. Marketing tends to see it as an investment to be protected. Both positions are partially right and partially self-serving. Procurement transformation requires a third position: media as a commercial lever, evaluated on what it contributes to business outcomes, not on how little it costs or how creative the executions are.

Getting there requires structured conversations between finance, marketing, and commercial leadership, usually facilitated by someone who can translate between the languages. It also requires a willingness to surface uncomfortable truths about how media decisions have been made historically, which is why many organisations skip this step and go straight to the RFP.

Building a Governance Model That Holds

Procurement transformation without governance reform is a rebranding exercise. You can redesign the RFP process, appoint a new agency, and introduce outcome-based metrics. If the governance model does not change, the old behaviours will reassert themselves within two years.

Effective media governance has three components that most organisations either skip or implement badly.

The first is a clear decision rights framework. Who approves channel strategy? Who approves budget reallocation mid-flight? Who has the authority to pause a campaign that is not performing? In many organisations, these decisions are either unclear or require sign-off from so many stakeholders that the media team cannot respond to market conditions in anything like real time. Good governance does not mean more committees. It means clearer ownership.

The second is a measurement framework that is agreed before the campaign runs, not retrofitted afterwards. This sounds obvious. It is almost universally ignored. The tendency is to wait until results are in and then decide which metrics to foreground. Agreeing the measurement framework in advance, including what success looks like and what failure looks like, removes that flexibility and forces a more honest evaluation.

The third is a regular review cadence that includes commercial leadership, not just marketing and agency. Media investment decisions should be connected to business performance data, not just media performance data. If revenue is growing in a region where you increased brand investment, that signal matters. If it is not, that matters too. Keeping those conversations in separate rooms is one of the main reasons media investment stays disconnected from business outcomes.

Scaling governance models without losing commercial discipline is a challenge that shows up across growth contexts. BCG’s work on scaling agile organisations is relevant here, particularly the emphasis on maintaining strategic coherence as decision-making becomes more distributed.

Agency Relationships: What Transformation Means for How You Work With Partners

Media procurement transformation almost always changes the nature of agency relationships, and not always in the way clients expect.

The instinct is to use transformation as an opportunity to renegotiate fees downward. Sometimes that is appropriate. More often, it is a distraction from the more important question of whether the relationship model is fit for purpose.

The traditional agency model, where the agency is a vendor executing a brief, is poorly suited to the kind of strategic media planning that transformation requires. If you want an agency to help you build a channel strategy grounded in business outcomes, you need to give them access to business data, commercial context, and senior stakeholders. Most procurement processes are designed to keep agencies at arm’s length. That tension does not resolve itself.

The agencies that are genuinely useful in a transformed procurement environment are not necessarily the largest ones. They are the ones with strong planning capability, honest measurement practices, and a willingness to tell clients things they do not want to hear. I have seen agency pitches where the agency told the client their current attribution model was wrong and their channel mix was backwards. They did not win the pitch. They were right.

Outcome-based remuneration models are worth exploring, but they require a level of measurement sophistication that most clients do not yet have. Tying agency fees to business outcomes sounds attractive until you try to agree on what counts as an outcome, how long the attribution window should be, and who is responsible for the variables the agency cannot control. It is a better model in principle than it is in practice for most organisations. Start with better measurement before you redesign the fee structure.

What Good Looks Like: The Markers of a Transformed Media Procurement Function

A transformed media procurement function looks different from the outside and feels different from the inside.

From the outside, the RFP process is shorter, sharper, and more strategically demanding. Agencies are asked to demonstrate how they would approach a specific business problem, not to present their credentials and fill in a rate card. Shortlisting criteria weight strategic thinking and measurement capability more heavily than size and trading relationships.

From the inside, media investment decisions are connected to commercial data. Budget reallocation is possible mid-flight without a six-week approval process. Finance and marketing are having the same conversation about media value, not parallel conversations that never quite meet. The measurement framework was agreed before the campaign launched, and the post-campaign review is honest about what worked and what did not.

The agency relationship feels more like a partnership and less like a vendor relationship. That does not mean the agency has less accountability. It means accountability is structured around outcomes rather than inputs.

None of this is particularly complicated in concept. The difficulty is in the execution, specifically in the organisational change required to get finance, marketing, procurement, and commercial leadership aligned around a shared framework. That is where most transformation programmes stall, not in the procurement process design, but in the internal politics that surround it.

Understanding how go-to-market strategy connects to media investment is part of a broader set of commercial disciplines covered across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, including how channel decisions, audience strategy, and business planning fit together.

The Measurement Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Every media procurement transformation conversation eventually arrives at measurement, and then usually stalls there. The reason is that honest measurement is uncomfortable. It reveals that some channels are not performing as well as the attribution model suggests. It reveals that some agencies have been gaming the metrics. It reveals that some of the decisions made over the past three years were based on data that told a convenient story rather than an accurate one.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which is one of the few places in the industry where marketing effectiveness is evaluated against genuine business outcomes rather than creative merit or platform metrics. The entries that stand out are not the ones with the most impressive data. They are the ones where the measurement framework is clearly connected to how the business actually makes money. That connection is rarer than it should be.

The honest position on media measurement is that it will never be perfect, and organisations that wait for perfect measurement before making decisions will be permanently paralysed. The goal is honest approximation: a measurement framework that is directionally accurate, consistently applied, and genuinely connected to commercial outcomes. That is a much more achievable standard than perfect attribution, and it is a much more useful one.

Organisations that have genuinely transformed their media procurement tend to have made peace with measurement imperfection. They have agreed on a set of metrics that are good enough to make better decisions, and they have built the governance structures to act on those metrics without waiting for certainty that will never arrive. That is not a compromise. That is commercial maturity.

Tools like those covered in this overview of growth and measurement tools can support better media analysis, but the tool is never the answer on its own. The framework and the governance have to come first.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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