Yesterday I read an article reprinted by the Marketing Society ‘What the COI reforms mean for government marketing’; I almost fell off my chair.

The article concludes:

‘For the marketing and advertising industry, we need to think really hard about whether we want to engage our services for free, because every marketer knows that when you offer a product or service for nothing, it is not perceived to have any value.’

I wondered if this was supposed to be a grand and generous extension of the Big Society; an invitation for marketing agencies to ‘do it for the good of the country’ – possibly forgetting that those ‘doing it’ still have food to buy, mortgages and, of course, tax to pay – unless some quid pro quo arrangement will provide us with some form of corporate and personal exemption.

If the objective of this reform is to save money, I have another thought – get rid of the appallingly time consuming and expensive OJEC tendering system, beloved by the government and quangos.

We used to work for one of the government funded organisations charged with raising awareness and creating a need for services which organisations didn’t really want, but the nanny nation deemed valuable and necessary.

After an eight month process we were appointed to deliver a series of integrated marketing programmes – identity design, advertising, direct marketing, PR and events – fantastic. However, although we ran some interesting campaigns, the cost of preparing the tender in the first place pretty much negated any profit for the first year.

After two years the terms of OJEC dictated we re-tender. We were invited to attend one of a series of off-site briefing sessions – over 100 agencies attended. Now even if only a third of those who attended decided to participate, imagine the investment involved – and indeed wastage; this time multiplied because the marketing programme had been divided into individual marketing discipline specific packages – so not one tender to submit, but many.

Of course, each tender had to be read and evaluated, so it wasn’t just a case of marketing agency investment, but an enormous commitment for the client marketing team too – I couldn’t help wonder if their time would have been better utilised doing some marketing, as opposed to marking tenders.

We were appointed on three of the new discipline packages but over the next two years generated precisely zero revenue…so even the winning agencies didn’t really ‘win’.

The next time the tender invitation came around we declined (and the next time too) – much to the disbelief of the government backed organisation – how could we reject the offer to compete…answer: ‘because the continual process of tendering didn’t make business sense’.

Of equal concern is the number of commercial organisations now following similar processes as part of newly established approaches to procurement; recently we’ve received long and detailed briefs for small tactical campaigns; it’s as if a lack of confidence, or perhaps it is fear of failure has permeated businesses so they over-complicate and overload information, unable to cut-through and clarify the core issues.

The result is that it’s starting to take longer to participate in the pitch/ tender, than to create and deliver the campaign and that can’t be right.

So please let’s get back to basics, a little respect and understanding of the time and effort invested by all parties; let’s focus on creating marketing programmes that encourage people to change the way they feel and they way they behave, rather than issuing and filling-in endless bits of paper.