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EVENT BLOG: 125 agency partners named by COI: is the roster worth the paper it's written on?

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Posted on 01/12/2009 12:05:31 by James Thornton

How will the Government's marketing wing make its mammoth roster work with public spending under the microscope?

A mammoth agency roster is not always a bad thing: discuss.

This week the Central Office of Information (COI) revealed its latest agency roster, naming 125 different partners across a total of 10 categories.

COI director of live events Simon Hughes has been quoted as saying the COI has extended the range of suppliers on the framework to provide greater choice and in order to “focus our procurement processes”.

The latter point, certainly to the untrained eye, appears to be a whopping contradiction in terms.

Read the full story at citmagazine.com >>

But, with a £12m annual budget, maybe this system works for the Government’s marketing wing, even with public spending being scrutinised as it currently is.

But, to drag out the battered corpse of BT’s roster one more time, the telecoms giant has just stripped its agency list from 42, with a BT spokesman quoted as saying that, due to the downturn, some agencies had seen little or no work since securing their place on the very long shortlist.

And while the COI list reads less like a ‘who’s who’ of UK event agencies and more like ‘who’s everyone’, there are significant names missing, large and small.

Maybe they didn’t make the cut, maybe they didn’t want to waste the time, money and resource in pitching to be on a list that might mean nothing in terms of actual work.

Possibly Simon Hughes doesn’t see agencies taking the risk of the COI ‘doing a BT’ as his concern, but he seems a bright spark and one imagines he has a plan that works for all concerned.

It would be very interesting what questions were asked by agencies and what answers and commitments were forthcoming from the COI.

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