Woolley Marketing: Open tender, closed tender, or why not no tender?
In his regular column for Mumbrella, Trinity P3 founder and global CEO Darren Woolley tends to an “unconventional approach”.
There is a common procurement process called the ‘open tender’. This is where an open invitation is extended for anyone and everyone interested to tender for a particular contract. In days passed, the invitation was run in the Classified Advertising pages of the newspapers either under ‘Public Notices’, or often appeared in its own section called ‘Tenders’. In a digital world there are online directories and portals where you can register and be notified when a suitable tender is listed.
The Open Tender is a particularly popular approach used by government everywhere. In this way those running the tender can argue that they have considered all possibilities without fear or favour. When it comes to marketing and particularly advertising tenders, this approach is not as popular for many pragmatic reasons I will get to later. But in the parlance of modern dating, Open Tenders are like dating everyone on Tinder rather than inviting a selected few through Bumble.
So, you can imagine my surprise when on LinkedIn I read a post by the global chief marketing officer of Guzman y Gomez Mexican Taqueria thanking the more than 110 advertising agencies who had enthusiastically responded to and participated in their agency tender process.
