Ad Sales Blog

Beyond the buzz words of new media

I lost a sales media training program last week. The publisher hiring the sales trainer insisted his print centric staff was failing at online sales because they did not know the new media semantics. He told me, "They know the brand and how to sell, they just need to know the new buzz words."

I didn't agree. Assuming his sales staff had graduated high school, learning a few new word definitions should not hold anyone back.

When moving from selling print to integrated or interactive selling the deeper issue is understating the shift going on in marketing itself and how it impacts your advertisers. After you understand this shift the "buzz words" take care of themselves.

Media sellers are not the  only ones discussing this shift. Yesterday, Kevin Downey, a writer at Media Life articulated it for media buyers in way that sellers should hear as well:

"How people use media is changing dramatically, and the era of force-fed commercials is nearing an end.

What's taking its place--and has been for several years at least--is a dialog between advertiser and consumer, and more and more the consumer is in charge.

Media buying agencies need to become part of that dialog. They need to learn how to spark that exchange. Those that fail to do so will face extinction. Or that's the clear warning in a new study from Forrester."

Kim then shares from the Forrester study he based much of his column on:

“Today’s agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand loyal,” writes Peter Kim, a senior analyst at Forrester and author of the report.

“To turn the tide, marketers will move to the connected agency, one that shifts from making messages to nurturing consumer connections.”

The forces killing off the old system are twofold, and one is the explosion of media options that make no one medium a must-have experience. It's the end of mass media in which advertisers could push out their message and consumers were forced to accept that message as the price of admission.

Nobody’s a captive audience anymore, argues Kim. Expensive ad campaigns across mass media no longer work in this new media landscape."

On your next call.

You need to stop thinking about how the media you are selling will "expose a message to a target audience" and start thinking about how the media you are selling will elicit a reaction, interaction, or ongoing relationship with a group of individuals. Stop thinking exposure and start thinking interaction. Now remind the members of your staff who can't sell the online piece that with it there is no feedback loop or interaction. Oops.

FYI, I wrote more about this in my February Folio column.

Read Kevin Downey's column in Media Life

Buy the Forrester Study

Why being "likeable" counts

Sales lesson from the campaign trail #2:

Hilary Clinton, behind in delegates and the polls for the Democratic Presidential nomination is taking the offensive. Shown here today taking to task a Barack Obama campaign brochure she claims spreads misinformation about her health care program.

How will voters react?

Voters will react as they always do; ignoring criticism about people they like and embracing it against people they don't.

It is easy to forget that few American Presidents were more widely criticized than Ronald Reagan, but it all just slid off the likable "Teflon President" without a scratch. The minimally funded Swift Boat attacks of the 2004 Presidential election stuck to John Kerry like glue who many demonized having criticized American Vietnam policy, and seemingly to many, the troops as well.

Hilary's case will stick not on merit, but on how likable voters perceive her Vs. Obama to be. Judging by how well her campaign's "plagiarism" criticism stuck last week I would guess not well.

On your next sales call you may think that being likable is not so important, after all we now sell in the measurable world of digital media. Aren't results more important than everything? Think again. On the surface your clients are rational business people, but when criticism flies people are more likely to evaluate on the emotional side. They will ask, "Do I like them, do I trust them?" The next time something goes wrong (and something always does) how much will stick to you will depend on how well liked you and your organization are.   

Paul Simon said it all in the Lyrics to his 1968 song "The Boxer" when he wrote,

"All lies and jest. Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

Folio Column: Managing the "Interactive Shift"

Usually I post a link to my Folio columns their website but a link has not been posted yet.

I think of this as my most important "sales transition" column as it maps the underlying issue that is driving the whole transition. It's not about new technology. It's not about adding the latest cool on line product to your sales offerings. It's not even about keeping up with the future.

It is about the fundamental shift in what marketing is, as we move from marketing that presents messages to a targeted audience, to marketing that engages individuals in interactive experiences.

If you develop your media products, promote your media, and manage your sales staff with this fundamental shift in mind you will be successful in the future.

Can you sell in a recession? Take the test!

Selling in a recession takes a different attitude. I always like to share this test with salespeople to see if they are up for the challenge. The trick is that this test actually comes from the December 1932 issue of Opportunity Magazine, written for salespeople during the Great American Depression. If you can pass a sales test written during The Depression, I figure, you are up to sell in a mere recession anytime!

Answer yes or no to the following:

1. Am I sociable?
2. Do I think in terms of success?
3. Do I really like selling?
4. Do I think of my customers interests?
5. Do I read sales literature?
6. Do I study my prospects?
7. Is my personal appearance a credit to myself and the company I represent?
8. Do I realize that success in selling is a matter of study and perseverance and that the element
of luck is small?
9. Am I cheerful in the face of interruptions?
10. Am I always courteous even with unreasonable prospects?
11. Am I always scrupulously honest in my representations?
12. Do I think of selling as a dignified calling worthy of my best efforts?
13. When faced with competition, am I inspired to excel?
14. Do I know that my line of goods is the best on the market?
15. Do I try to make repeat sales?
16. Do I talk quality first and price later?
17. Do I stay with a line of goods long enough to give the line a fair trial?
18. Do I spend sufficient time perfecting my demonstration to make it convincing?
19. Do I take advantage of every modern convenience in selling, such as the telephone,
telegraph and letter service?
20. Do I canvas systematically and never skip places because they look uninviting?
21. Do I work regular hours even when the weather is unpleasant?
22. Do I put in the extra time to close a deal when necessary?
23. Do I put extra effort into selling after a poor day?
24. Do I put extra effort into selling after an unusually good day?
25. Am I determined to stick with selling despite the lure of a blind alley, time clock, type of job?

Score Table

No. of Questions Answered Favorably Rating
25: Star Salesman
20: A Success
15: On The Way
Below 15: Need Overhauling

Recession fighting chart

Over the past half-century, there have been nine recessions, with an average length of 11 months each. If we head into a recession...eventually it will end as well.

On your next call.

If you are engaged with an advertiser who is thinking about cutting back their ad spend because there might be  a recession, show then th the chart below. The chart will make tangible the idea that all recessions end. Then ask ask them a simple question:

Who will your customers think when the recession is over if a competitor of theirs kept advertising?

Using post game Super Bowl chatter to sell ad space

The NY Giants won the football game but who won the ad game? After the show there will be many reviews of the ads and which ones got the viewers attention. It turns out there is a big dividend paid to those Super Bowl ads that score high, literally. University of Buffalo doctoral student Jing Jiang and Cornell professor Charles Chang studied the relationship between company stock price and Super Bowl advertising for the last 17 Super Bowls and discovered that the top 10 Super Bowl ads significantly moved the stock price right after the game for advertisers.

According to the study, "The stocks of companies running ads that ranked in the top 10 outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 index by 26 basis points the day after the game and by 1.6 percentage points over the following week.

After four weeks, the shares did almost 3 percentage points better than the S&P 500, although Kim says the link between the Super Bowl ads and the performance of the stock weakens over time because other news and events could influence the price of the shares."

Curiously, there was also consistent minor positive movement on stock price of companies whose ads scored lowest. It seems the most dangerous place to be as far as stock price goes is in the middle.   

As you chat with advertisers today, the day after Super Bowl Sunday, mentioning this curious study is a great way to reinforce the effectiveness of advertising and of the importance of having great creative that connects with an audience.

Read all about the study

Watch the ads

Online media buyers are different

As we struggle to understand the differences between selling online and print media it is important to know that ad agencies are struggling to understand the differences between buying online and print.

The career advice column from Media Life, "Ask Rachel" laid out the differences while offering advice to a media buyer considering a move from buying traditional media to online media: 

"Given that digital planners generally earn more at the same title and experience levels that their general market counterparts, there is room to give a traditional person a raise but still bring them in and save money."

Online is very demanding, for one. You'd likely be working with multiple clients, many of them with misconceptions about the medium. So you would be teaching them as you learned, always a challenging endeavor.

Also, online undergoes constant change, day by day. You'd spend huge amounts of time simply staying up with the changes and weeding through the endless hype that comes with them.

You'd likely be doing it all, too. It's the nature of online that job functions tend to blur. You'd be strategist, planner, buyer, manager, and analyst of how the campaign served or did not serve the client's objectives.

You'd have to excel when it comes to attention to details. You’d have to have an open mind that's not afraid to undertake digesting a lot of new information very quickly. You'd have to be real good at numbers. And you'd have to be a solid communicator, explaining it all to clients and your supervisors--without a lot of wasted verbiage. You'd have to be a great negotiator.

The next time you call on an online media buyer, consider the different pressures he or she is under compared with the print people you call on right down the hall.

Read the whole column on the Media Life website