At our recent Marketing Procurement Reloaded webinar, senior leaders across the industry examined how marketing procurement must evolve as AI and new operating models reshape the landscape.
Our panel featured Pascal Ducheix (Wella), Graham McKay (Dyson), and was moderated by Simon Francis, Co-CEO of Flock Associates.
Our whitepaper, Marketing Procurement Reloaded: Growth in the Age of AI, explores these themes in greater depth, alongside benchmarks and practical frameworks for procurement teams. Download your copy here
Below is a summary of the key insights and takeaways from our session.
Procurement’s mandate is expanding
Marketing procurement is moving beyond its traditional remit of cost control, compliance, and negotiation. Leading organisations are redefining the function as a creator of value that drives growth, one that influences where and how marketing investment is deployed, evaluates the ROI of different levers, challenges legacy operating models, and unlocks more agile, data-enabled ways of working.
Implications for procurement: Savings still matter (of course!), but their strategic redeployment matters more. The value of procurement increasingly depends on its ability to direct efficiencies toward the initiatives, channels, and partners that deliver the greatest commercial impact and to ensure those decisions are grounded in evidence.
Building AI-Enabled (Bionic) Ecosystems remains a Work in Progress
AI has dominated conversations around the industry, yet the reality behind the noise is far more uneven. Agencies are at different stages of maturity, some actively redesigning operating models and workflows around AI, others protecting legacy structures despite claiming to be ‘AI-enabled’. On the client side, most internal teams remain in pilot mode, trialling tools, testing use cases, honing in on where AI genuinely adds value, rather than operationalising it at scale.
Implications for procurement: evaluate readiness with rigour, pressure-test AI capability claims, distinguish genuine technical advantage from over-hyped claims, and ensure investment flows toward solutions that deliver measurable value and not simply towards the loudest promises.
AI-washing is accelerating and scrutiny must match it
As AI becomes the default sales narrative, procurement is increasingly confronted with inflated claims, opaque pricing, inconsistent fee structures, and proprietary tools carrying premiums far above comparable market alternatives. Evidence of genuine value uplift often remains limited.
Implications for procurement: AI value needs to be evidenced not assumed. Procurement must push for transparency, benchmark tools rigorously, challenge inflated productivity claims, and protect organisations from paying innovation premiums without demonstrable return
Remuneration models are shifting
Automation is accelerating the adoption of new pricing structures. Asset-based models are becoming more viable as outputs become standardised and automated. Outcome-based remuneration is gaining traction but requires clearly defined metrics and risk boundaries to avoid misaligned incentives. In parallel, operational KPIs such as right-first-time rates, reuse levels, workflow efficiency, and QA scores are becoming central to agency performance management.
Implications for procurement: setting the guardrails, redefining expectations, and ensuring remuneration structures reward the behaviours that genuinely drive performance.
Looking ahead: growth-focused, tech-informed, commercially anchored
As AI and marketing technologies accelerate, CMOs are increasingly turning to procurement as a strategic partner – one that brings structure to complex decisions, filters real opportunity from noise, instils commercial discipline into innovation, and ensures governance across an expanding ecosystem of partners and platforms. No longer a gatekeeper, procurement is becoming an active accelerator of marketing transformation, and as AI reshapes how marketing is planned, bought, and evaluated, the function is moving firmly to the centre of business growth.
Helping Procurement Teams Navigate What’s Next in Marketing
Flock continue to lead marketing change for the most future facing advertisers and their marketing procurement teams. If you’d like to understand how these shifts in procurement will affect your organisation or preview our new Agency Management Platform launching in January, book a time with one of our team using this link.
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