It’s tough to be an online salesperson working for a major publisher these days. Marketing budgets are tight, RFP lists are more challenging to get on, and it’s getting harder and harder to rely on that “buyer/seller relationship” to yield deals. As advertiser media budgets continue to shift from direct buying to exchange/network buying, the need to differentiate a premium offering and truly earn a direct sale is at an all time high. A day at a baseball game followed by a 5-star dinner just isn’t working like it used to.
As strong as it may be, the relationship can only go so far. What added value can the salesperson provide that the media buyer can’t get from ad networks and demand side platforms? If the salesperson is pitching a leaderboard at $8 and the media buyer is getting leaderboards for $1 on an exchange- can you blame them for going with the most cost-effective solution?
Sales used to be so simple...
Fact is- leaderboards and skyscrapers alone aren’t going to cut it any more. If that’s all a salesperson can offer- he or she needs to seriously reconsider the pitch. After all, ad networks only threaten to cannibalize the offering if the offering isn’t differentiated. So change it up! Stop thinking “inside the banner” and take a long hard look at what else you can offer as a direct publisher partner that an ad network/exchange can never offer (roadblocks, micro sites, take-overs, co-branding, guaranteed delivery, email/newsletters, etc.).
That becomes the pitch for a direct publisher. It’s naive to keep pretending the advertiser isn’t aware of all of their media buying options. Today an effective salesperson needs to not only convince the buyer that their site is going to out perform its competitors but that the value of buying directly will far outweigh the value of buying indirectly.
But it’s still not that easy. The more media buyers understand the need to target audience, the more challenging it will be to continue to sell content. The emergence of “intermediaries” doesn’t help either. The advertiser now works with the agency that works with the demand side platform that works with the exchanges that work with the pub aggregators that works with the publishers….
Advertisers seem to be embracing this new landscape though. They understand the need to distance themselves from direct sales in an effort to gain the automation and cost efficiencies associated with exchange buying. The result: publishers can’t even get their foot in the door to pitch advertisers/agencies directly. Media buyers tell them to work with an intermediary now. So much for that “buyer/seller relationship” the salesperson spent years developing.
Even the largest online publishers in the world are struggling with this shift. I used to work for one of them so I know this first hand. But as a publisher- if you accept the state of the market and embrace it (not fight it)- you can get the benefits of automated yield/advertising to compliment your manual/direct sales efforts. It can happen. But it starts with establishing an indirect sales strategy; something many publishers are reluctant to do.
In my next post I’ll go into why publishers are so resistant to developing an indirect sales strategy… Stay tuned!
