Internet Advertising: Suffering A Sales Crisis.

As the head of a digital sales team, and a sales guy from back-in-the-day when print ruled my world, it’s hard for me to say it, but, here’s how I see it -- At a time when the Internet as a media has not taken advantage of a complete advertising breakdown in newspapers and magazines, we, as digital publishers, have largely failed. Think about it! We haven’t taken big share points. We haven’t converted that huge client to shift all their money to the Web. We haven’t had that defining moment, or tipping point, that shows the Internet as the dominant consumer attention getter.

What I hear too much about, and what is endemic to the problem here, is technology. There is no shortage of technology. The fact is, targeting technologies are ahead of most publishers' ability to use them and keep pace with them. Good technology does not equal a good sales effort and a poor sales effort will lead to a lack of customer and user satisfaction with the technology they use. That's what this industry is seeing right now. We have technologies that are very sophisticated and very complicated. But sales teams are providing only the features of the technology. The benefits and user advantages are on the back burner. When the benefits and advantages are presented, how to execute to ensure success is often not covered.

The core problem is in strategy. Technology providers talk about implementation and code. This is a great example of the devil being in the detail. Take, for example, the whole movement towards the use of remarketing pixels for targeting purposes. It would shock you how many companies talk to me about remarketing and fail to think about the look-back period that ties to that remarketing opportunity. My job is to convince marketers that remarketing is not, necessarily, the best use of the medium... and a remarketing opportunity is only as good as the analytics behind it. For instance, marketers who are not weighing remarketing bid prices for different look-back windows are probably leaving money on the table.

The next problem is tactics. Salespeople are the vehicle for tactics. If sellers don't know the ins-and-outs of technology, publishing platforms and reader preference research they will not know the proper tactics to suggest and then follow up on. Reaching the right audience, especially when we're talking about 162 million people, is not a “set and forget” process. This is not a ghost in the machine. There's a person in there.

Basic behavioral and audience targeting is a good technology to focus on. It is exactly where the consumer is; it is exactly where a good publisher has always been.  But let’s look at three improvements any sales team can make, and what I want to focus on at the Fox Audience Network:

• Sell the medium: As I alluded to earlier it is not technology we sell, it is a medium. Behavioral and audience targeting is fascinating, without a doubt. But unless a sales team can get a media planner to understand that it delivers a relevant and valuable audience it does no good. Save the technology discussions for beers after work. The internet delivers customers.
• Become a source of information: We try to keep clients up to speed on changes in our content, network composition and anything else that comes into our stream of research. If a sales team can maintain its status as a source of trusted information, it integrates with an agency or brand side client on an important level. That’s relationship selling. 
• Play as a team. Gone are the days when information is horded among sales silos. A team should have at least a reasonably consistent message about content, audience, and data. Every player gets to put his or her own spin on it, but don’t let each team member act like they keep a set of data behind a firewall. It's very important to play as a team when so many deals happen so quickly. 

I don’t by any means short sell technology. It has its place in any sales and marketing presentation. But I’m a cheerleader for the Internet as a medium that delivers customers.