Ad Sales Blog

"Why advertise on your website when mine is bigger?"

Welcome to your newest competitor...the website of the company you are trying to sell. I was surprised when I first got hit with this objection, but the advertiser had a point. It was a major corporate account, one of largest in the industry I was selling in. Just after I presented the case for advertising on my publication's website he said abruptly, "My site attracts five times the traffic as yours, and all of them are current or potential customers. I'm putting my money into my website, not yours."

The point my  advertiser missed had to do with objectivity. While buyers will use an advertiser's web site to gather information, no one expects it to be objective. A company that sells a product may not always offer unbiased, objective product information. On the net, skeptics rule.

A study released in the Health Services industry backs this up. The survey conduced by Prospectiv  documents that the Internet was the overwhelmingly the most trusted and reliable resource for researching ailment and drug information, beating out broadcast media and magazines by a large margin.

Seventy-five percent of 800 consumers who responded to Prospectiv's 2007 Pharmaceutical Marketing CPI poll said they view the Internet as their most trusted resource for ailment and drug treatment information, followed by broadcast media (15 percent) and magazines (10 percent).

But the kind of Websites used was revealing. Consumers favored general health web sites to pharmaceutical company sites by a huge margin.

General health web sites 54 %
Specific ailment-focused sites 37 %
Pharmaceutical company sites 4 %

Your advertiser may offer very accurate information, but buyers want the objectivity that comes from a third party. Here is where your publication's brand comes in. When your advertiser's message comes through a trusted sources like the ones you sell it will have that extra credibility.

How to use this on a call:

Print out the article I link to below on the MediaBuyerPlanner website with the article headline,

"Websites, but Not Pharma's, Top Resource for Ailment and Drug information Information."

Show it to an advertiser and explain this came from a media planners webiste. Use it to explain the survey and establish credibility.

Now show the down load of the actual poll questions themselves. It's a Word file. Just show them the numbers about readers preferring general content sites as opposed to Phara sites. It should be convincing enough.

If there are doubts about the sampling methodology, don't worry it actually works in your favor. These questions were asked of Prespectiv maintained panels of opted in consumers that they maintain for corporate clients. If anything, since these consumers opted in to be on a panel for corporate use, one would think they would have an above average toleration for corporate web sites. Turns out it makes no difference. More on the methodology on the lat page of the download.

If you don't sell in a health service industry you may need to take one step further. Explain that this is one example, of many, of where skepticism on the Web drives traffic toward independently sourced content.

Link to an article describing the study with "the headline"

Download an abbreviated version of the survey containing the questions discussed above: Download prospectiv_pharma_poll_june_2007_posting.doc

Research results on the Prospectiv website

Are newspapers old or new media? Yes.

This past Tuesday the National Newspaper Association, with members facing big drops in print ad revenue, launched a campaign to reposition newspapers as multimedia platforms. With the tag line , “Newspaper: The Multi-Medium,” they hope to lay claim and monetize the extended reach of their web presence. Citing more Nielsen stats than you'd ever want to read, they claim that collectively, newspapers and their web products reach 70% of all adults each week.

For print media publishers everywhere this is a great blueprint. Selling media is competitive and if your magazine doesn't get the ad another magazine may. But remember to sell the value of your base platform (consumer magazines, b to b magazines, etc.).   

Read the press release from the National Newspaper Association

Is your web traffic ready to "compete"?

"Compete.com" makes a bold claim. Enter any URL into it's search type interface and it will  deliver web site visitation statistics for that site. This is an amazing sales tool if you are looking for a way to compare the web traffic of your site to a competitor's.

But is it accurate?

The numbers that compete.com delivers are not actual visitation statistics, but projections based on a panel of over 2 million web users;

"Based on the daily web usage of more than two million members (and growing!) of the Compete community, Compete calculates and estimates total traffic and rank for nearly every site on the web. We use rigorous statistics to make sure our estimates balance demographic and connection factors that match the entire U.S. Internet population."

Since the sample of tracked users is in the two million range, smaller web sites will likely fall bellow their radar.
Accurate? I say, accurate enough for a sales call and accurate enough to start or deepen a customer dialog.

Give Compete.com a try with your competition's URL

Compete.com: "Where do these traffic numbers come from?"

The 10% newspaper problem on your doorstep

Scot Karp on Publishing 2.0  Blogsite estimates that the print/web transition is now at a 10% tipping point. Using the New York Times as  an example he calculates,

"Let’s assume that the NYTimes.com has roughly the same portion of ad revenue coming from online. What you find, with some modest rounding, is that print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue — the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be."

Read the whole analysis

"Rachel, I want to switch from ad sales"

Last Friday, career advice columnist "Rachel" of "Media Life" (written for media buyers) offered advice to a media buyer who had unhappily switched into media sales and was considering a return to the buying side. Having lived on the selling side with a constant struggle to understand the media buyer's point view I found this fascinating.

Rachel's advice:
  "You will have to be prepared to overcome a couple of hurdles but also consider what you have working in your favor. You've been selling into media departments for six years, so you know how the process works. You also know how media planners and buyers think, what they value, and how they make their decisions.

That puts you way ahead of someone just out of college.

If you've sold print, your best course--and this is a no-brainer--is to approach an agency that handles a lot of print clients. You know both buyers and planners, so the entire process should be familiar to you, though of course you will still have lots to learn once you get in the door.

If you're in broadcast sales, you are coming into contact with buyers rather than planners, so your best way in is through the buying department, then hope to move over into planning in time.

Here's the bad news: salary. You are probably making well over what you can expect to earn at an agency, and you would take a big hit in the first several years, one recruiter friend tells me.

'But once you are established in planning, your salary can increase markedly as you move up the ladder,' he says."

Read the entire column at Media Life

 

Anecdote to put search in place

   Here is an anecdote to share with advertisers who spend more money on search (and less with you) than they should. In the July issue of Practical Webdesign, tech columnist Dave Chaffey (www.davechaffey.com) was asked to comment on Google's purchase of the web ad serving giant DoubleClick,

"Stats show we only spend around three percent of our web time on search engines, and Google sees the remaining 97 per cent as a massive revenue opportunity. I think Google is really interested in the DoubleClick Advertising Exchange, which will give it a way to launch its own network for display advertising--one that won't work on a keyword basis , but by targeting demographics."

This is a great anecdote to share for two reasons:

1. Google , the unquestioned online search king, is extremely interested in web display advertising. For your advertisers who think search is the only online play tell them that Google, just spent $3.1 Billion (with a "B") to buy the leading online ad display serving company.   

2. Search only accounts for three percent of web usage time. Three percent! If "time spent" determined the proportion of dollars spent, "search" would barely make the media buy! But don't get carried away. Search is a valuable tool that your advertisers should be using. The way you get back your dollars that search is siphoning off is to put search into perspective. Sharing how little actual time is spent on search helps do this.         

Funny video: "Permission to buy"

In media sales you can often sell a non committal buyer by helping him find "permission to buy." This can be done by interfacing with others in his organization to get an OK to proceed, or by working directly with your client to help justify a purchase. Either way, this video puts "permission to buy" into hysterical perspective.

Study: strong link between ad spend, blogs, and buzz

For new publications looking to sell advertising, buzz sells, and blogs spread the buzz.
So says a new study from Nielsen's BASES research division on new media launches which found a big correlation between big media spend and the buzz generated by blogs.

"Marketing strategies that separate advertising and paid media from pure word-of-mouth tactics can be severely misguided, according to a just-completed study by The Nielsen Company, which found that high blog interest, or buzz, around new product launches is tightly linked to paid media spending."

While this might be great news as you launch a brand extension, consider what this means for your existing portfolio. Blogs are a great way to build buzz, and buzz sells!

Read a report on the study in MediaWeek

Read the press release posted on the Nielsen site

Not so rosey on the buyer's side?

Think things are changing fast selling advertising? Think about what it looks like on the other side of the table.

Gary M. Katz CEO of Marketing Operations Partners (www.mopartners.com), writes that corporate marketing types don't have it so easy either,

"Many of us are working in marketing departments that spend most of the time fighting fires and kissing up to CEOs for fear that our corporate survival depends on such compliant behavior. We've often settled for reactive, chaotic, dysfunctional work environments where we operate more like order takers at McDonalds and company mouthpieces (spin doctors) than real change facilitators and difference-makers in our organizations."

Katz advocates fighting back by creating a "Marketing Operations" hub where marketing functions as well as sales and new product development functions can be coordinated.

"Embracing marketing operations is a win-win for everyone, but bringing its benefits into your marketing function is an evolutionary process. MO is both a serious commitment and a great opportunity."

This kind of reorg can be messy especially if sales, new product development, and marketing are not on the same page. 

Read the whole article On the he MarketingProfs website:
Integrated? Strategic? Why Marketing Needs a New MO

What is a click worth? Why Nielsen's new metric is good news for you

Here is a great selling tool for battling the "not enough clicks" objection so common when selling publication branded online media.

The whole argument for our online advertising, as opposed to the search or general online media you compete with, is that while our clicks or page views may be fewer, they are based on more relevant content and deliver a more involved reader. Last week, Nielsen, arguably the most credible media monitoring service, just told the world that page views are not enough. Their web site monitoring service will refocus on TIME SPENT on a site as the primary metric, deemphasizing page views.

Reacting to the Nielsen announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported,

"Page views have been a major barometer of a Web site’s popularity and help set advertising rates, but the measure is becoming less relevant. Online publishers and advertisers say page views don’t capture consumer loyalty to a site or reflect the increasing popularity of online video and new technology that automatically refreshes Web sites, thereby depressing page views.”

Here is how you use this on a call.

"Time spent" on a site is measurement of involvement. Talk up the Nielsen policy shift and, if appropriate, remind them these are the same people doing the famous Nielsen TV ratings. Now, show them the story, "Nielsen to focus on time spent, not page views, in measuring Web site popularity."

They don't have to read the article, the headline says it all. If your advertiser can see the point that "time spent" and "involvement" are better metrics than "click throughs" and "page views" then go on to explain why your media will deliver greater involvement per visit by talking about your  unique reader and why they are important to the advertiser's business. 

This is also a great news item for selling accounts were search is gobbling up a disproportionate slice of the ad budget. Search tends to get short "time spent" ratings because as they are designed to quickly move users to desired destinations.

This angle covered on the Read/Write Web blog

Original announcement from Nielsen