Come in mediocre sales person, your time is up
As a career media sales guy, I have always enjoyed driving revenue (and profit) for the media companies I’ve worked for, on behalf of, and co-owned but “doing deals” pretty much always fell in to two camps:
- Creating the perfect advertising solution for my client, whether it be working with the editorial teams to craft the right kind of paid advertorial when I was at The Independent, or working closely with a website owner in order to create the perfect canvas for an advertisers new high impact campaign when I ran Monetise.
- Receiving a booking from an advertiser for a standard media campaign because the advertiser pretty much demanded that they appear on that publisher/site.
As a sales professional, guess which one I got my “rush” from? Which one of these two drove my self-actualisation and feeling of satisfaction of a good day’s/weeks/month’s work came from?
Now I got paid the % commission irrespective of which of the two scenarios happened, because it’s all the same once it’s in the finance process.
However, I only added value to one out of these two deals.....
In these times where advertising spend is pooled around certain media behemoths (Google, Facebook et al), for the rest of the branded media companies out there creating content and trying to thrive it is key to have creative and highly trained advertising sales professionals doing their thing.
It is even more important that the ‘cost of sale’ for the vanilla ad bookings is reduced in order to drive profitability and efficiencies for media companies.
Over the past 10 months, the team here at Media Ventures have been working on creating the next iteration of the One Central Point business, which is a technology platform that allows top tier publishers across the world direct access to a plethora of professional international media planner/buyers. This is an upfront media buying platform soon to sit on the desktop of international media buyers across London and then the rest of international media sales hubs across the globe.
Our plan is to automate the upfront part of media buying. International is the area where there are the greatest inefficiencies and need on behalf of both the agency and publisher side.
If you want to understand more about this space, or find out more about StraightLine.io, drop me a line for a friendly chat.
Helping brands & retailers with product discovery to drive incremental profits on their website and from their digital marketing. Athos Commerce brings together the best of Searchspring, Klevu & Intelligent Reach.
10yI was mighty impressed Jon Walsh many years ago of the importance of creativity and the human touch when it comes to display and digital advertising. In speaking with Glam Media, it was the first and only time someone (Hannah Gosh in fact) took a media brief and showcased how they would have responded. In fact, it was a bloody good response; creative and innovative, far from a vanilla response. After all those years, it is still stuck in my mind because of that creative approach. Look forward in catching up soon.