Brewer asks Diamond about media buying middlemen and procurement reform

I have a question about procurement.

Obviously, in this case, it's often the, I call them the middle managers or the millers of the world.

How do you think that does or doesn't work?

I know you didn't have much time, so I wanted to follow up.

No, and I would say as an operations person, I rely on the subject matter expertise of people like Jose Bayona and indeed Roman Goffman at DCAS and saying, how does this work?

I think in terms of it's really evolved and COVID was a big sea change in terms of getting information out.

So again, we talked about meeting people where they are.

That's always been the goal in doing that way.

I would really say I think procurement wise, it desperately.

needed to be reformed, and we did a great job of reforming that because it was an awful lot of money without necessarily a lot of product.

But again, I think this is why you want a procurement and selection method with all of the protections that it has because you're measuring outcomes.

What's our goal?

There's a way of measuring all these things that does indeed sanitize it.

So all in favor of more creative ways of reaching people, but again, we need to do it in the ways that are...

Not violative of other laws that are there for a reason.

And it really comes down to the idea of, they spoke about it before, people are trained about this all the time.

So either the training didn't happen, or someone ignored it, something happened.

And it's especially worrying when it's the mayor's office, because again, as an agency grunt will tell you, the chances of them downloading an app on their phone they're not allowed to have are exactly zero.

So that is perhaps the worrying part.

Okay.

Thank you both very much.

I really appreciate your time.

Thanks for waiting.