Is the value proposition for selling advertising broken?
I go to a lot of conferences.
What I follow-up upon as reports for this site are ideas that are immediately usable.
But often there is a concept or a theory that I find quietly nagging at the back of my mind.
In the last few weeks, I've found myself pondering many of the ideas that were raised by Gatehouse Media president and COO, Kirk Davis, (featured in this week's two reports) at the SNA/Blinder Revenue Summit.
As usual, I've summarized a couple of his "step-by-step" plans to be passed along as executive briefs (one of my members who couldn't find her password last week, needed the set of hiring questions for telemarketers before an interview she was conducting in ten minutes...that sort of thing).
But some issues are difficult to address meaningfully in a "how to" or a snapshot because they emerge from amorphous areas and moving targets; no one pays for a site that warrants only that the subject is confusing and unresolved. One of these areas is the human infrastructure within our companies.
Let me throw in one more caveat, those who believe that only new business units can save their company are going to miss the point. I'm not going to address the "separate or perish" issue here, except to say that even in the companies that are ostensibly separated, such as Deseret Media, the established media side of the media company is a changed beast, fully leveraged and multi-media in and of itself. There is no, real escape, in other words, from the crucible of internal change.
And what I've thought about a lot, is how disempowered managers in the industry say they feel when they are not doing an adequate job of recruiting, retaining and developing, let's put it this way, better employees. I've heard any number of publishers in and outside of conferences express frustration with the quality of candidates or the difficulties of getting teams to play harder - hard enough to win the new and larger games that companies have invented in the new local spaces.
What Davis talked about, surprisingly, on the other hand, was a sense additional responsibility to his teams. It is not going to be enough to stand at the helm shouting "Take the hill!" while bemoaning a lack of motivation among foot soldiers for whom each new "marketplace" of local merchants looks like an armed bunker.
And I quote, from Davis, "We do not have the right, yet, to expect brilliance from our sales teams." What? Did we get that right? Yep. Management, in other words, still has more work to do in training, compensating, product-launching, packaging, measuring results - and everything else that management is responsible for - before it can demand the kind of accountability for performance that it often seeks.
Another exceptional moment, came when Davis suggested that, according to the local advertisers, newspaper prices are too high. In fact, the value proposition for mass media advertising is beginning to seem, to the advertisers, broken. This sparked questions like, "Are you going to lower your prices?"
Davis' response: "They are already being lowered" around the country, as local media "saves" accounts by negotiating rates, and that somewhere out there, floating between supply and demand, is a new rate that is appropriate, attainable, and needs to be somehow re-addressed into the rate card.
Even this acknowledgement is a huge step forward from requesting that sales people, both turn into individual ad agencies, while, essentially, still shoving the same giant pricing structures down the throats of as many advertisers who will swallow them, in order to achieve a huge but slowly declining revenue number.
A solution to this issue may be to lower the print rates - which are already perceived as too high - but raise the online rates, which are perceived as lower, by selling targeted ads, and integrated multi-media packages against great campaign ideas, and the measurable results that advertisers clearly want. ReachLocal charges MORE for SEM services than media companies by focusing on ROI, rather than the cost of the product.
Of course that means, having great ideas, brilliant packages, well-trained advertising designers - as well as stressing and marketing the value proposition of local media companies (trusted brand, huge audiences). Again, the finger is being pointed directly back at the job of managers, not always at the sales teams.
The last take-away, I should add, at the risk of having a Kumbaya moment or giving you one more issue to keep you awake at night, is this: In transforming your company's culture, are your managers simply the most goal-driven and high-stakes achievers, or are they also managers that people want to work for?
Are you that kind of manager?
Many thanks this week to Kirk Davis, President and COO of Gatehouse Media for sharing these imponderables, along with concrete ideas included in this weeks reports.
