Ad Execs To RFP: RIP
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, March 21, 2018
The dreaded RFP -- or, request for proposal -- is losing favor with ad execs, especially marketers, and the rise in programmatic media-buying may be thanked.
In the first survey benchmarking ad executive sentiment about RFPs, three out of five say they plan to stop using them in the next …
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The Media RFP process has steadily been "evolving" for lack of better terms - in that it seems like we do more RFI's simply to start the conversation, but very few true RFP's any more. Programmatic - whether RTB or PMP deals really have done away with the need for extensive RFP processes, and then when you throw in most of our clients are using DMP's now - and the reality is, the RFP was more of a publisher based request than anything. RFP'ing DSP's or sites with audience capablities similar almost seems like it would defeat the purpose. So point well taken - I just hadn't really thought about it.
When I get an RFP my first reaction is 'Yeah, I got an RFP!' Then my second reaction is, 'Crap, I got an RFP'.
I think what we are talking about here is a very specific type of RFP. If I understand the context correctly, this is an RFP issued by a marketer to a (group of) potential programmatic platforms. They state "here is how much money I have, here is who I am after. How are you, platform, going to deliver this and at what price point?"
I can believe that this variety of RFP is declining, as the demands of programmatic have become more sophisticated (i.e. beyond pure lowest cost) and some have taken this in house.
The "other" RFP is the one I am more familiar with, which comes from marketers seeking a change to their total eco-system of marketing. They are unhappy with (or unclear about) the performance of their marketing dollars, they feel their eco-system has ballooned into something that does not work as well as it should (i.e. silo-ed, with redundancies and inefficiencies, etc.) and the outputs of their marketing eco-system do not reflect the world that their consumer lives in. The occurence of that RFP is not going away, but growing, in our experience.