Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 42

In 2003 Mel Karmazin’s CBS television and radio salespeople’s approach had not changed since I was Eastern Sales Manager and then VP and General Manager of CBS Radio Spot Sales from 1967 to 1971. The approach was internally focused, and its sole purpose was to maximize revenue for CBS and the stations Radio Spot Sales represented. This maximizing revenue approach meant that salespeople sold the “magic,” which was typically audience estimate numbers (ratings) and promises of ad positioning that they often could not keep. For example, a media buyer would place an order with a local television station salesperson for a schedule of 12 spots a week that were to run for a month in morning, early, and late news programs. However, one‐third of the scheduled 48 spots would be preempted (not run) for various phantom reasons such as “technical difficulties.” Station sales managers would preempt a part of virtually all schedules to take subsequent orders placed at higher rates. Therefore, an inordinate amount of salespeople’s time was spent negotiating makegoods with media buyers, who were made furious over this preemption‐and‐makegood process. This system was highly inefficient, ethically questionable, and totally self‐serving, not customer serving or customer focused. Such a system was based on the leverage that local television and high‐rated radio stations and television networks took advantage of because they had scarce ad inventory that was in high demand.

However, the birth and unprecedented growth of Internet advertising reduced the leverage of television and radio stations by expanding to virtual infinity the amount of available advertising inventory. This expansion changed the marketing ecosystem from one of scarcity before the Internet to one of abundance, and when Google introduced the self‐serve online auction model with AdWords,ⁱⁱⁱ advertisers had direct access to advertising inventory on which the auction market, not media sales management, set ad prices that were affordable and guaranteed to run as ordered.

Google, then Facebook and other Internet advertising platforms, led the way to a different approach. Instead of an old‐fashioned media sales department’s focus being internal – to maximize revenue – a contemporary media sales department’s focus has to be external – on a customer’s success.