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17 Top Takeaways from the Media Trends Webinar

What an incredible webinar!

While the response to our 2019 trends report has been fantastic, we were really surprised and thrilled with the number of people who registered and attended the webinar.

A big thank you to Amit Aggarwal at iHeartMedia and Mike Peretz of A+E for joining Zach Cross and me to discuss the big trends disrupting media and strategies to win in this new media marketplace.

As promised, it was an info-packed session with tons of great ideas.

Read on to get the biggest takeaways.

Evolve How You Sell

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The reality is that martinis alone won’t make the sale anymore. Today, relationships are still important, but advertisers purchase based on ROI.

This topic hits home for most media execs I speak with, so it’s no surprise that everyone on the panel had a lot to say about it.

How can media companies win in this new world where outcomes and data rule?

  1. Develop clear attribution to prove the ROI of ad spend. This is a big one because advertisers need to see measurable, meaningful impact to their objectives and KPIs to buy from you.
  2. Provide ROI guarantees to make advertisers confident about their return on ad spend. It’s one thing to predict ROI, but guaranteeing ROI is extremely powerful, as A+E, NBC, and others with guarantees have found.
  3. Embed analytics in your sales organization so sellers can easily access the data they need to prove ROI.
  4. Add dedicated support to take manual work off your sales team’s plate. Standalone teams like development and planning can handle more administrative tasks so your sellers can sell.
  5. Standardize offerings so there’s less custom work for your sales team. When offerings are “grab-and-go,” sales will be more productive.
  6. Automate pre- and post-sales activities to give your sales force even more bandwidth.
  7. Provide new sales tools and training so sellers are better equipped to succeed. Something as simple as a CRM can streamline their activities, and new sales methodologies like SPIN Selling and the Challenger Sale can make them more effective.
  8. Incentivize sales on yield management. It’s not as simple as finding more money. Today it’s all about finding the right money. Focus your sales team on yield management and incentivize them on it. Better yet, give them a plan-building optimization tool to give them deep visibility, and you can see big results.

Use Digital Disruption to Your Advantage

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Digital disruption has changed consumer and advertiser demands in a big way. And, media companies are caught in the middle, doing a precarious balancing act to make everyone happy.

How are companies winning at this?

  1. Embrace digitization to satisfy advertiser and consumer needs. In order to embrace digital, you need the right infrastructure. One way iHeartMedia is making this happen is through the acquisition of Radiojar.
  2. Enable programmatic buying to give advertisers the speed, insight, and transparency they crave.
  3. Move into podcasting to take advantage of a new source of content in a high-potential growth area, like iHeartMedia has done with great success.
  4. Forecast audience for opaque channels to maximize revenue. While you might not have access to audience data on platforms you don’t own (Hulu, for example) you can use data from your owned channels and project it onto your opaque channels to get close to the mark.
  5. Develop 1-to-1 pricing models for digital that recognize the new, unique value exchanged, which is very different from more traditional 1-to-many value and pricing.
  6. Leverage new platforms the smart way. More platforms mean more access to your content. But it can also mean brand cannibalization and price degradation. Think through strategies that empower you to leverage benefits and minimize risks.
  7. Bring in new advertisers that may have lower budgets. Different platforms, your focus on ROI, and attribution guarantees will appeal to these new advertisers.
  8. Lean harder on technology to free up your teams for higher-value work. For example, a proposal optimizer can do media planning for your sales team. Let systems move spots on a log for your traffic team. Let machine learning transcribe and execute copy instructions from advertiser emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets.
  9. Provide approved price ranges to sellers to give them pricing discretion with the guardrails necessary to maximize value, and to simplify pricing decisions.

More Ideas and Strategies to Set You Up for Success

I hope you find some useful ideas in here that you can put into action now, and longer-term initiatives you can be thinking about as you’re planning for what’s next.

Want more ideas, more context and detail on the ideas above, a pros/cons list of solutions, and access to the live Q&A session? Watch the recording of our ad pricing trends webinar.

Plus, don’t forget to check out our popular 2019 Dynamic Pricing & Revenue Management Trends in Media report to see what your fellow media executives from across North America think about the key trends and strategies shaping media today.

Email me to share all your webinar comments and questions, and to let me know if you’re interested in being on a future webinar panel.

And, to get some good advice on how you can use predictive analytics to succeed in this new media landscape, simply send me a meeting invite.

Thanks all! Best wishes as you transform pricing and revenue management in your media organization.

 

Steph Garfrerick

Steph Garfrerick is SVP, Media Vertical at Revenue Analytics. In this role she oversees all functions of the vertical and leads the go-to-market strategy and long-term vision for RateOptics, the next-gen pricing system that powers some of the largest media companies in North America.


Steph Garfrerick is SVP, Media Vertical at Revenue Analytics. In this role she oversees all functions of the vertical and leads the go-to-market strategy and long-term vision for RateOptics, the next-gen pricing system that powers some of the largest media companies in North America.

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