Media Selling. Warner Charles Dudley
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Mel Karmazin’s magic has been replaced by data, which some experts have called the new oil, and which has made buying and selling media infinitely more complicated than it was before the Internet allowed marketers to micro‐target consumers based on their Internet browsing and searching behavior and their intention to buy a product.
Complex digital‐era selling requires new assumptions and approaches to media buying and selling, which we will examine in this chapter.
Digital‐Era Media Are Still “The Media”
Even though the Internet spawned new ways to create, publish, and distribute news and entertainment content and new ways to buy advertising programmatically, the newly created media platforms such as Google and Facebook are still perceived to be “the media” by the public. The media, including digital media, are ubiquitous and powerful, and they transmit advertising, political, cultural, social, and moral messages (either intended or unintended) to a mass audience. Over the years “the media” has been under attack from both the right and left of the political spectrum. In the 1960s, as you learned in Chapter 1, Theodore Levitt defended advertising from critics who thought it was creating a materialistic society. In the 1970s, conservative hawks accused “the media,” particularly television, of vilifying the military and for the loss of the war in Vietnam. In the 1990s, liberals and Democrats accused “the media” of prosecuting President Bill Clinton. In the 2016 presidential election “the media” were accused of distributing fake news, especially by Donald Trump.
However, “the media” is not a single, monolithic entity. Media is a plural noun that includes a multitude of outlets – television, digital platforms, radio, newspapers, magazines, out‐of‐home advertising (billboards and posters), and digital and printed newsletters – that communicate in a multiplicity of voices, political orientations, and opinions.
Because of the complex and fuzzy combination of show business and public service, the media have always been and will continue to be loved and hated, praised and vilified, regulated and deregulated, and given credit or blamed for everything from keeping our nation free to poisoning the minds of our children. Salespeople in the media must learn to deal with all types of extreme reactions and to accept the fact that they, as representatives of their medium, will have to face these, often highly emotional, reactions on a daily basis.
The good news is that, as a salesperson for a medium, you will often have easy access to clients. The bad news is that your medium will be blamed for everything from a client’s sore back to the election of an unpopular president, and you will have to listen to the reasons for your medium’s and all of the media’s failures. Many people tend to lump all the media together as a monolithic target for their anger, so it does not matter if you are selling for a website, a television network, a radio station, or a newspaper, you will probably get comments about how awful the media are. You will have to learn to listen non‐defensively, not to take insults personally, and to respond unemotionally and good‐naturedly to criticism.
New Assumptions for the Digital Era
The media industry is changing at an accelerated rate in terms of both technological advances and the audience’s tastes and needs. As America continues its transition from a production‐oriented, analog economy to an information‐oriented, digital economy, consumers become more informed and more selective.
Assumption 1: The media are fragmented
In the past, the traditional media enjoyed virtually guaranteed profits, but today the media are becoming increasingly fragmented because of the disruption caused by the Internet. There is a plethora of media, especially digital media, chasing smaller and smaller market segments. As the audiences of traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, and television decline, the audience of digital media is exploding. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other digital and mobile advertising‐supported businesses are growing and, thus, gobbling up more and more of the available advertising dollars. Therefore, profits are declining in most of the traditional media as well as in marginal digital media. However, as the competition for advertising dollars increases, the need for effective salespeople increases.
Even though sales jobs at radio and television stations have declined in many markets, and sales jobs in newspapers and magazines have been reduced dramatically, sales positions in digital and mobile companies have exploded, so that the total number of media sales positions in America has increased overall. Also, media fragmentation has resulted in it being more difficult for the salespeople of smaller media companies and publishers to get traction with marketers and advertising agencies. Therefore, more and more small and medium‐sized publishers are turning to selling their advertising inventory programmatically and, thus, are reducing their sales forces. On the other hand, sales jobs in data analytics companies, consultancies, exchanges, and platforms such as Google and Facebook have increased. There have never been so many opportunities for competent salespeople in the media; and yet today, selling is more difficult, complex, and competitive than ever before. To succeed, you must be better trained, better prepared, and better educated than was the case in the past.
Assumption 2: Automation changes the sales process
Over 80 percent of all digital ad inventory is sold on an automated basis, or programmatically. Programmatic refers to the real‐time bidding (RTB) for an available online ad impression by a demand‐side (advertiser) algorithm, the acceptance of a bid by a supply‐side (media) algorithm, and the serving of a digital ad. This bid‐ask–purchase–ad‐serving process takes place while an ad impression is loading on a laptop or smartphone screen in 200 milliseconds, or in the blink of an eye. Chapter 17 explains in detail how programmatic buying and selling of ad inventory works.
It is estimated that by 2020 the vast majority of all media advertising will be automated – bought and sold programmatically – which means that the negotiating and transaction phase of the media buying and selling process will be done by algorithms in an artificial intelligence (AI) application, not by humans. Therefore, the nature of media selling will change as automation does many of the routine tasks involved in the prospecting, qualifying, researching, proposing, negotiating, and transacting phases of selling as well as the planning and executing of media buys done by marketers and ad agencies. Media selling will become more about educating marketers and media planners about the advantages and benefits of a medium or platform during the planning stage of advertising campaigns. It will be about coming up with innovative ideas regarding targeting, optimization, creative executions, promotions, endorsements, and events that appeal to a medium’s specific audience and about connecting emotionally with everyone a salesperson calls on.
Assumption 3: The explosion of complexity makes media selling difficult
There are two main drivers of complexity in selling digital advertising: (1) the marketing ecosystem is more complex and (2) digital ad targeting adds even more layers of complication.
First, the marketing and advertising ecosystem has become infinitely more complex, as visualized in the Display LUMAscape graphic available at https://www.lumapartners.com/luma‐institute/lumascapes/display‐ad‐tech‐lumascape/.
The graphic shows the number of service companies that come between marketers such as P&G, AT&T, Amazon, and Ford and publishers such as The New York Times, The HuffPost, and NPR. These businesses include:
Advertising agencies
Retargeting companies
Ad Servers
Verification/Privacy companies
Agency