Found myself talking to an agency and a client who were on the two sides of a recent procurement process the other week. (Separate conversations, same event.) The agency went into the procurement process as the preferred supplier; in fact the client had set a bias within the system valuing their work at double the level of the competing agency. Therefore, to win the account the other agency had to be prepared to do the work for half the fee that the preferred agency would be prepared to charge. You can guess what happened. The less favoured agency dropped their pants to a level that the preferred supplier wasn’t prepared to go to. The result? The client ended up with an agency they didn’t want, presumably doing work at a level below what the preferred agency could achieve. And the “winning agency” ends up making a massive loss on the account. (PRmoment knows the hourly fee & it’s unbelievably low.) So at the end of this no doubt long and drawn out process, no one was happy, except I suppose the robot in procurement. Doesn’t make sense to me but undoubtedly procurement’s use is on the rise and PR will struggle to justify its contribution unless it improves the measurement of its tangibility. Evaluation is rapidly becoming a must have, otherwise in the procurement process, PR agencies are left only able to compete on price.