Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 79

Advertising and media agencies are typically efficiency oriented and require a service‐oriented (farmer) salesperson who understands and is experienced operating in a numbers‐ and data‐analytics‐oriented selling environment. Most advertising agency buyers do not care much about results; they are experienced specialists who are mostly interested in the type of audience a medium has, price, and responsive service.

Agencies depend on the media for their existence. Their incomes are based to some degree on how much advertising they buy; conversely, the media depend on agency buying decisions for much of their revenue. As a result, agencies and media continually perform a ritualized, arm’s‐length waltz: Agencies try to buy at the lowest prices possible, and the media try to sell at the highest prices possible. This is a good example of an ambivalent, co‐dependent, love‐hate relationship.

A further complication is that agencies tend to be defensive about their accounts because of the tenuousness of agency–client relationships. Although clients and agencies have contracts that normally spell out the financial details of relationships, rarely is a long‐term commitment involved. Agencies will serve their clients because of an advertiser’s trust, faith, and, too often, whim.

Advertisers might drop an agency for a number of reasons: advertiser personnel changes (a new person at the client wants to make a change); new personnel at the agency (the client does not like an agency’s new creative director); agency plunder (agencies target other agencies’ clients); or moving the digital media buying in house. Salespeople who call on agencies must learn to deal with the complex needs and behaviors of agency people, particularly of media buyers.

Media buyers are in the bottom echelon of an agency’s media department. They are typically overworked, unappreciated, and underpaid. They are the agency’s infantry troops slogging through mountains of media research and media proposals. There is little wonder that buyers tend to be defensive, given the pressure under which they work. They are particularly touchy about salespeople calling on their clients.