My Experience Being Ghosted By Procurement After An RFP

My Experience Being Ghosted By Procurement After An RFP
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Urban Dictionary defines Ghosting as: The act of ceasing all communication with someone the subject is dating , but no longer wishes to date . While I am was well aware of the term in my personal life, I recently realized that this act is seeping into the corporate world.

Allow me to explain, I own an experiential marketing agency and pitching business is nothing new, so when we received an invitation to submit an RFP for arguably the World's Best Known Brewery , we were beyond excited because we thought this was a real opportunity. We were informed by the young procurement contact that the brewery was reviewing their agency roster for 2016 and they had issued an invitation to 100 agencies , of the 100 , 70 had accepted. ( I should have pondered more heavily why 30 had declined when they could not have been that many conflicts)

So in March 2015 we started on the journey , we submitted the RFI and were invited to pitch , we went through 2 rounds and in May 2015 were invited with 29 other agencies to pitch in St. Louis. We had at this point worked two months on this RFP and spent thousands. The day came for us to pitch in St. Louis and when we entered the room there were three people from procurement only , not one marketing person , not even an Assistant Brand Manager, That struck me as odd but I figured well this is the way they doit. We presented and felt good about the work and the two months of late nights and hard work we had put into the pitch .

We returned to New York and a week later heard back that we had made the last cut down to 10 agencies and that we were to be given an assignment as a test in the coming month . We were over the moon with excitement , all our hard work had paid off finally and we were so close to that reward .

Two weeks past and my business partner emailed our contact and received a reply that they were just waiting for the final directions from "Marketing". June came and went and in July she reached out again via telephone , this time the same reply was given , then all communication ceased. No emails and no calls were returned . Complete Radio Silence , the rest of summer was filled with the self doubt in our heads , maybe we sucked that bad ? but why would be asked to pitch then ?
Maybe our young millennial procurement officer had suffered a freak Snapchat accident that rendered him unable to communicate?

2015 ended and with it still no explanation , then last week I was interviewing a new Executive Creative Director from a large Experiential Agency and he brought up the RFP of 2015 , and suddenly all the feelings and emotions bubbled back up like some bad agency PTSD. He said that it had happened twice to him and that it was probably just an exercise to see what was out there and even worse a way to get pricing to renegotiate their current agency rates. I was incensed .

I accept the terms of the RFP process and us doing work to pitch but not if it is for some "procurement exercise" , Does a multi billion dollar marketer care about smaller agencies that spent time and out of pocket money to participate in said "exercise"? I wrote this blog post flying back from the West Coast and wrestled with whether I should write this blog. Would I be blackballed by them? That I don't care about after my experience with them , some other agency can work for free for the honor of having their account , not me .

I am writing because I spent years on the client side and never witnessed anything like this , There should be mutual respect on both sides . I got into this business to do great work for brands and shift behavior through marketing not to be a gerbil in a procurement experiment.

This also goes for spec work which I am finding more and more clients asking for and until recently we were doing . The Toronto Ad Agency Zulu Alpha Kilo created the perfect spec work parody last year and since then I have cut Spec work by 50 % and intend to get to a no spec work policy this year.

I don't know if I am the lone small agency owner that feels this way but I figured instead of suffering in silence any longer I would speak my truth in order to heal and renew my faith in all the great brands still out there and all the hard working agencies giving their best in this strange new world.

After all, you are only as sick as you're secrets... My Name is Michael Fernandez and I was Ghosted by Corporate Procurement.

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