text: 5. No soup for you – It’s really frustrating for a media planner when a publisher does not respond at all. To fight the “spray and pray” approach mentioned above, publishers are getting smarter about which RFPs they respond to. The emerging best practice is to ignore most RFPs and only engage with those that meet strict criteria. To get a high response rate, planners need to be sure to limit sending RFPs to only high probability programs. Otherwise, they risk being ignored and labeled an RFP spammer.
  6. Square peg in a round hole – Despite explicit instructions in the RFP, proposals often come back in a variety of incompatible formats (e.g. Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel). This creates extra work for the buyer: they have to reconcile and standardize the information for client presentation. This is a big waste of time for the planner.
  7. Incomplete – The RFP asks 20 questions, but the proposal only answers 13 of them. This puts the media planner in a difficult situation. Do they go back to the publisher and ask for answers to the other 7 questions? Or do they drop them from the plan? Both sides are to blame for this problem. Planner should avoid asking too many unnecessary questions in the RFP. Sellers needs to be more diligent in their replies.
  8. Wasting time – The RFP process is time consuming for both buyers and sellers. For a buyer, it typically takes 38 hours across 4 job functions to conduct the RFP process. For a seller, it typically takes 4 hours to respond to an RFP with a proposal. A campaign with 10 RFPs consumes 78 hours of work for buyers and sellers.