Media Sellers: Craft and Refine Your Sales Pitches

How can a seller best refine their sales pitches so that their content is optimally showcased and valued? Even in this changing media environment, sales rules for optimal valuation are evergreen. Media sellers need to be innovative and creative to keep up.

According to Hanna Gryncwajg, SVP advertising sales at RLTV, “Over the past decade the process of working on advertiser’s brand initiatives has unified the ad sales and marketing teams. The most successful sales executives are not just media savvy, they also need to be creative and marketing-centric.”

Focus on the Client
The number one rule according to senior sales executives is to find out what the client wants and needs. What are their goals? Then, discover other attributes that will help a sales presentation be as relevant and targeted as possible. Research not only the client but also their competitive sets, any market or category challenges, opportunities, and brand messages.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

David Sable of Y&R at MediaVillage.com's 3rd Annual 1stFive Summer Intern Experience, Powered by Turner

Disruption is a word we hear often when describing the media business today. Job functions are changing. Areas of expertise are shifting. What does a student intern need to do to craft a career in media? There was plenty of insight into these concerns and others last week at the 1stFive.org intern reception powered by Turner at the Time Warner Center. Jack Myers, founder of MediaVillage.com and creator of 1stFive, set the tone by warmly welcoming the group. “We are really happy to gather you together as a group to recognize you, to tell you how important you are to us and how excited we are to have you join our community,” he said.

In his acclaimed book Hooked Up: A New Generation's Surprising Take on Sex, Politics and Saving the World (Shelly Palmer Digital Living), Myers explains that Millennials are actually three separate groups – pre-Internet, post-Internet and those in the middle who experienced first-hand the transition from traditional to digital. "As a generation you are gender neutral," he told the crowd. "You are not hierarchical, you love experiences and are not aspiring for financial success. You are more interested in doing social good." His overview set the stage for C-Suite industry speakers, all of whom offered the interns some sage and actionable career advice.

“When I talk to you I will give you things to think about,” promised David Sable (pictured at top, below left and at bottom with Jack Myers), Global CEO of Y&R. His presentation, titled Food For Thought to Get You Through the Winter, offered a list of things to consider as part of one’s career progress.  (I would like to note that this list is useful no matter where you are in your career.)



Consider This a Journey
Acknowledging that media is an industry of connections and relationships, Sable advised, “Look who is sitting next to you and around you.  The people you see now, I guarantee, you will see twenty, thirty and even forty years from now.” His advice?  Get to know people and don’t think of your career as a linear progression. “Life is not linear, my career was not linear,” he explained.  “It never occurred to me how my career would end up. I never changed jobs for money. I never had a plan. But I knew that I wanted to advance my thinking. Everything I did was a way to learn something else.”

Disrupt or Be Disrupted!
Sable made the point that any industry, product or service can be disrupted -- and you do not need technology to disrupt it. “We digibabble [ascribing magical marketing powers to digital] ourselves to death,” he said, offering as an example Dabbawala, which is a food delivery service in India that collects, delivers and returns lunch boxes from homes to workplaces daily via bicycles or trains. This very simple and basic service, functioning on color strips of paper, has disrupted the food delivery service in that country, he explained.

Dissidence
Sable exhorted the group to join a movement, break convention and change the world. In effect, replace disruption with dissidence. “Dissidence is about getting people to join a movement,” he said. “Think of life a different way. Dissidence is people first, and dissidence does not depend on best in class technology.” He also noted the difference between “mobile” and “mobility.” “A laptop is mobile but you are not mobile sitting here,” he said. “Mobile is about the device -- an iPad, a phone. Mobility is about your life.”

Axioms
“Digital is everything but not everything is digital,” Sable advised. “We still go out to restaurants and concerts. But everything may have a digital piece to it such as going out and buying coffee using an app.  Technology is not the be-all and end-all.
“Avoid digibabble,” he continued.  “Digital is not magic. It is just a tool.  Amazon is opening up brick and mortar stores.  At Cannes, Snapchat and Pinterest weren’t using their platforms. They were using 3D displays to get people’s attention. It was called a digital effort but it was a billboard, and it was up all the time.”

Sable also asserted that creativity is the story, innovation drives it and technology enables it. So ultimately it is about our creativity, inspiration and motivation, not the technology that advances who we are professionally and personally. “Radio was once an innovation,” he said. “So was television. So was cinema. So was print. The beauty of today is that we have this technology that allows us to enable. So we can enable that story in the innovation, in the distribution. And, we can add a buy button.”



Thoughts on Leadership
There is a difference between traditional and creative leadership, according to Sable. Whereas traditional uses the stick as punishment, creative uses the carrot as reward. Traditional is linear, hierarchical, relying on planning and executing and sustaining order.  Creative is more networked, non-linear, more iterative and risk-taking. It is the creative framework that is more successful in today’s marketplace. “Learn to live in a non-linear way,” Sable suggested. “Take a risk. You can’t wait for inspiration.  Those who learn to listen, to collaborate and to improvise are the most successful.”

Final Ideas
“Read everything, read interesting things but have a point of view,” Sable recommended. “Read things and try to connect everything you read.  And take care of ‘Brand ME.’ You are the CEO of your own company. It was first said in 1997 but it has never been more true.”

I would like to note that Sable's ideas are useful no matter where you are in your career.


This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

DPAA Explores the Mediapalooza

If you think at the television space has undergone change in the past few years, you haven't seen anything yet. In the world of out-of-home (OOH) digital placed based media, the impact of digital technology arguably surpasses all other types of advertising media. Which is why attending the annual DPAA conference is so important to understand the pervasiveness and effectiveness of digital messaging on consumer behavior. "It is a great time for video" exclaimed DPAA president Barry Frey, "The world is changing, disrupting, fragmenting and shifting like tectonic plates. Technology is forcing change upon consumer habits which is foisting change on media habits.  It is a Mediapalooza."

Indeed, now we can receive content and messages when we pump gas in our car, sit in a movie or a nail salon, shop at a bodega or a mall, use a vending machine, an elevator, a taxi or Uber or visit a doctor’s office. There are many new streams of data available through such novel sources as vending machines, airports, stadiums and gyms. The opportunities to reach consumers at every point in their day wherever they are, makes for new collectable datasets that can lead to an all-encompassing view of their behavior.

Currently “forty-one percent of OOH is digital,” according to DPAA Chairman François de Gaspé Beaubien and this is posed to increase over the next few years. Looking ahead, Frey predicts that "by 2017 more than half of all ooh revenue will be digital and 10% bought programmatically. There will then be a steep curve towards programmatic. *

So where is all of this disruption leading?

Change, Change, Change

Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategist for Publicis Groupe mapped out three areas of massive change - Globalization (which he deems “unstoppable”), Demographic shifts (noting that the average age in Africa is under 21 and the aging of China led to the reversal of the one child rule) and Digitization (which is driven by phones that today have “1000 more processing power than in the first space shuttle.”)

Marketing Without Borders

Tobaccowala reprimanded marketers who he said, “have to learn how to market. They haven't done so in 30 years. Eighty percent of what marketers were doing was logistics and managing revenue points.”  Relying on comparing yourself to a traditional set of competitors is risky because “threats and opportunities come from the outside.” Take, for example, the iPhone. “When iPhone came out Nokia and Blackberry did not take it seriously because it had no keyboard and, anyway, what did Apple know about phones? If you don't take people seriously, things happen. Benchmarking against other pathetic people doesn't make you any less pathetic.”

Forget Data Ownership. The Secret to Success is Storytelling

And the lure of owning your data? Tobaccowala is unimpressed. He said, “Owning data alone will be obsolete. It is how you access data not own it. It is the algorithms. Owning is so 1980s.” The secret to success is storytelling. “We have to recognize that we are talking to humans. Storytelling is very, very important. And mobility is also important.” He concluded, “Change sucks. The more things you want to stay the same, the more you have to change yourself. How do we change the people? We need to learn to collaborate.”

Ecosystem Dichotomies
Lori Hiltz, CEO Havas Media spoke of the “complexity of our business where the largest retailer does not own a store, where families are connected and disconnected at the same time and where technologies shape the dynamics of the new us.” Despite rumors to the contrary, David Sable, Global CEO Y&R asserted that, “TV is not over. Cinema is still strong. They say that print media dead but catalogs are having resurgence.” He also refutes the theory that as media gets fractured, TV audiences will likely get smaller. He said, “How do you define TV? We are watching more video than we have ever watched in the history of mankind. We are watching for longer and longer time. There are more screens and more shows to watch. In 1999 there were 26 series to watch. In 2014 there are 1715 series shows available to view, not including short form video.”

The Future is Expansive and Expensive

“Let’s set the record straight,” advises Sable, “The narrow definition of TV is digibabble. As Michael Wolfe wrote in his new book, TV is the new TV. It is simple. Think about the entire ecosystem. Twitter doesn't kill TV. It makes it better.” The idea that content can be free is unsustainable to Sable. “The future of free is dismal and not sustainable. Advertising pays for content. There are three ways to access content - steal it, pay for it or watch ads.” And just wait – “NFL contracts are up in 2022,“ Sable warns, “That is when the next big change will happen. That will be the next huge inflection.”