Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Apathy at the Highest Levels

Two Fundamental Causes of Senior Management Giving Up on Sales

Article | Mon, 07/11/2016 - 05:26

by: Frank Visgatis, President/COO of CustomerCentric Selling®

A disturbing trend that I am seeing in the marketplace is an escalating level of apathy at the senior executive level as it relates to the effectiveness and value of their sales organizations. In other words, more and more executives seem to be throwing in the towel when it comes to salespeople actually being able to move the revenue needle. As I dig deeper, I see two fundamental causes for this:

1. They have tried and failed one too many times when it comes to training their salespeople. After repeatedly turning to various sales methodologies and sales trainings looking for the magic bullet, and despite investing significant amounts of money, nothing has changed from a revenue or performance perspective. Time and time again, I see companies latch on to the newest, sexiest training du jour (can you say “Challenger Selling?”) in the hopes that this will finally be the one.

However, they repeatedly make the mistake of viewing the training as the end of the process when, in reality, it is just the beginning. Measurable sales results, no matter what methodology you subscribe to, are directly correlated to the commitment of first-line sales management to actually implementing what the salespeople have been trained on. Too often, with no commitment to the heavy lifting of real business process change, once they go nine to 12 months with no measurable results, they decide it must not have been the right training, when the reality is that they were never really committed to it in the first place.

2. They have bought too far into how much of an impact the Internet has had on the sales process. There are multiple, different studies that have documented what we all know: the Internet has changed the game for vendors. With so much information available online to potential buyers, vendors have decided that the best they can do is manage, and worse, encourage inbound inquiries. What they fail to recognize is that no matter how compelling your marketing messaging may be, the best that will likely get you is a seat at the table. In fact, I see so many sales organizations that have pivoted back to leading with a demo. That was a flawed approach 30 years ago and it is a flawed approach today. From a fundamental buyer perspective, when a vendor leads with a demo, having never taken the time to understand the buyer’s needs, all they are doing is throwing garbage against the wall and hoping something sticks. Additionally, without proactive salesperson interaction (i.e. understanding the unique needs of any given buyer), they fail to build any unique business value, and even when selected, are relegated to negotiating solely on price.

Salespeople, ultimately, are the only ones who truly can help a company move the revenue needle. The question is, are companies and their senior executives willing to acknowledge that there are no quick fixes? Or are they just waiting for the next “groundbreaking” research and approach to finally provide the pixie dust?

As companies race to develop new technology, better products, and the latest, greatest features, the ones that will succeed are those that recognize it’s not about them – it’s about the customer. The days of relying on your product for competitive differentiation are over. Even if you come out with some groundbreaking feature, you have to realize your competitors have access to all of the same information on the Internet that your prospects have. They will figure out how to either replicate the functionality or how to sell around it in very short order. The path to success in 2016 and beyond is creating a superior buying experience for your prospects by focusing on helping them achieve their goals, solve their problems, and satisfy their needs. How you sell is the true competitive differentiator. Whether or not senior management will get behind this concept is up to them.

Hanlon: Addressable TV's 'Inevitable Moment' Is Coming

by Karlene Lukovitz, Staff Writer @KLmarketdaily, July 8, 2016

eMarketer summed up the currently mixed addressable television scenario in a report released in late June.

On one hand, it noted a Starcom MediaVest survey indicating that an impressive 49.8 million U.S. homes, or half of all pay-TV homes, can now be reached with addressable TV ads. Further, eMarketer estimated that addressable TV ad spending will reach $890 million in 2016. That’s up 120% versus 2015 — but it represents just 1.3% of total television advertising spending. And while the analysts project that it will jump to $2.17 billion by 2018, that would still account for only 2.9% of total TV spending.

Audience Buying Insider asked Tim Hanlon, managing director of FTI Consulting in its Telecom, Media and Technology practice, to share his thoughts on addressable television’s current status and likely evolution.

In the online world, the term “addressable” is basically superfluous, because the entire medium is targetable, Hanlon noted. But in television, the sophisticated targeting that’s possible through addressable technology has been impeded by business practice conventions designed to maintain the players’ status quo.

“It’s not that the advertiser appetite isn’t there,” he says. “Advertisers began to be intrigued by addressable’s potential years ago. The availability of just two minutes per hour for addressable advertising in cable, and the need to string together multiple MVPDs, have stalled addressable, but the interest and the business conversations continue.”

Breakthroughs Needed On Two LevelsTo make addressable a viable, scaled opportunity, breakthroughs need to occur on two levels, he says.

“On a national level, cable has to break out of the two-minutes-per-hour ghetto. Addressable needs to be available across the entire hour. That would require a carriage agreement between a national MVPD and a cable network that enabled offering national advertising with hyper-local targeting capability. It would be a shift from an availability split model to a revenue-sharing model between the network programmer and the operator.

“On a local level, a local broadcast TV station group and an MVPD would need to form a carriage agreement to share revenue on advertising that’s locally addressable.”

Currently, the players are selling against one another, but Hanlon believes that we’ll see at least one breakthrough agreement at the national and/or local level by the end of the decade, due to converging market forces.

On the national level, cord-cutting and unbundling are pressuring the economics of MVPDs, which can’t raise subscription rates enough to compensate for the declines in subscriber numbers. “National advertising could help make up for the drop in subscription revenue,” he says.

Demand For Local TargetingAt the same time, local broadcasters are increasingly pressured to respond to the demand for granular local targeting. That demand is high in categories such as automotive, and particularly intense in political advertising.

“Campaign managers want to create their own target clusters, because single districts sometimes traverse several DMAs,” Hanlon notes. “The pricing for targeted reach would likely be higher, but waste in overall dollar terms would be reduced.”

He predicts that this election will be the last for traditionally structured local television buys. “There’s a stark contrast between what these advertisers can do in digital media and in local television, where they’re still having to buy whole metro areas or all DMAs in a region,” he says.
Similarly, Hanlon says, the days when it made sense for regional companies to buy national TV because the efficiencies of scale made up for the waste are numbered, if not over.

The advantages of television’s scale are rapidly becoming a “red herring,” he contends. “Marketers are now comfortable with precision targeting because of digital advertising. They don’t want to pay for waste, and there are now thousands of ways to create targeted scale,” thanks to audience data and the “IP-ization” of media channels.

“Going forward, we will see the ability to re-aggregate audiences to whatever scale is needed, by using first-party data instead of relying on proxies for audience targeting,” he adds. “Television is the last hold-out. And to their credit, media owners are to some extent already responding, by offering some data-enhanced targeting options.”

In short, the ability to realize precision targeting in television “is inevitable,” Hanlon declares. “The moment is near. It’s about to bust wide open.”

5 Best Practices In A Converging World Of Screens

by Aleck Schleider , Columnist, Yesterday, 10:00 AM

While Americans are busy planning their summer vacations, travel marketers are busy looking for new ways to reach them with the draw of sight, sound and motion. Palm trees swaying in ocean breezes, children splashing in water, tanned couples running on the beach, a tall icy beverage—these are the images that have been used to court would-be vacationers for decades.

Traditionally, these images lived on our televisions. Today, however, with video content ubiquitous across devices—from mobile and OTT, to laptops and tablets—travel marketers recognize that TV alone may not be enough. To fight against the effects of fragmented viewing, there are myriad opportunities to complement TV strategies with data targeting and cross-screen amplification.
But ample amounts of digital spend, few marketers are embracing true cross-screen media plans that manage traditional channels like TV, in tandem with digital formats like video.

Below are five best practices to do just that.

1. Rethink digital media

According to eMarketer, the majority of digital travel ad dollars go to search (55%), followed by display (34%), with only about 10% going to video. As this allocation suggests, digital is primarily used as a direct-response channel. Yet, as TV viewing is increasingly done online, digital advertising can can be used to build consumer experiences through engaging video creative that complements TV campaigns.

2. Extend programmatic benefits beyond display

According to eMarketer, more than three-fourths of digital display ads will be programmatic due to the application of data to better target and segment, as well as greater scale and efficiency. These same benefits can be recognized in video and, to a growing degree, television. Identifying and targeting strategic audiences is particularly important in travel, where ~5% of an airline’s passengers can make up 25% of its revenue, per Forbes. Targeting can also be used to identify segments such as leisure or business consumers, international travelers, or cruise enthusiasts—each with a different set of needs.

3. Let digital data inform TV buys

Looking at the role of data in targeting, an important opportunity is applying digital insights to television buys. Highly accurate online travel data sources, traditionally only available in digital, can now be tied to television viewing. For instance, a marketer could determine the best programs, networks or dayparts to target frequent visitors to their or a competitor’s site. The cost to reach a strategic target on TV can be greatly reduced, and efficacy improved. In fact, through the use of data-infused TV buying, we routinely see upwards of 20% increases in reach against advertisers’ strategic targets for the same budget.

4. Let TV data inform your digital buys

Similarly, by using TV campaign data, travel marketers can target consumers digitally based on their exposure to TV commercials. While this link can achieve a variety of objectives, one important use is to extend a TV campaign’s reach by targeting those unexposed or lightly exposed to a message. In one example, a travel marketer used online video to extend reach after its TV schedule’s reach began to max out. By pinpointing those not exposed to the TV campaign, online video drove 8% of the overall incremental reach in the second half of the TV schedule.

5. Achieve greater conversion rate with cross-screen planning strategy

Media consumption habits have been shifting for the last decade, but the dramatic spike in multiple-screen viewership has made cross-screen advertising crucial for marketers to maximize the return on their spending. We’ve seen tremendous benefit to marketers who employed cross-screen TV and video strategies. In one example, a large hotel chain targeted consumers with online video using behavioral and demographic segments, as well as segments based on TV viewing. Through a cross-channel analysis, we were able to compare the impact of TV and digital exposure on viewers’ online activity. We found that site visits for the advertiser increased five times among consumers exposed to both their TV and video campaign together.

Today, developing smart, holistic strategies targeting travelers across TV and video is crucial in order to reach an adequate number of the right consumers, at the right cadence, to drive action—up to and including conversions. Fortunately, the tools and best practices now exist to allow travel marketers to thrive in this new, converging world of screens.

Presidential TV Advertising Records Uptick In June, Koch Ad Scores

Many stations are depending upon political and Olympic revenue to make or add to their budget but if the former dollars go missing...the core of survival of our broadcast industry remains..DIRECT!
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D. CA

by Philip Rosenstein, Staff Writer

Political advertising on TV slowed down significantly at the tail end of primary season. May saw no new ads from the Trump or Clinton campaigns. Trump, with an unprecedented level of earned media, continued with a blank slate in June, while Clinton resumed with five fresh ads.

In June, the Bernie Sanders campaign aired one ad, and following the trend in previous months, it garnered the highest Ace Metrix score of the month, among candidate ads. Since the beginning of the year, Bernie 2016 ads have performed significantly higher than Clinton, Trump or super PAC ads.

This appeal comes largely from the Independent section of the electorate, which responded positively to the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Sanders ads beat the average Ace Score among Independents by 66 points. In an election year that has become a #Never Donald or Hillary contest, attracting those voters in the center will be both crucial and increasingly difficult.

Hillary Clinton now has Sanders in her corner, with the Vermont Senator set to appear at a rally with her in New Hampshire this week. As far as June ads, however, it is a Koch brothers ad that was most appealing to Independents.

“End the Divide,” the Koch spot, scored highest overall among all 327 presidential ads aired in 2016. It rated second to Sanders’ “Fairness” among Independent voters. Interestingly, the two ads addressed the issue of a growing wage gap and stratification in the American economy, pointing to what resonates best with those all-important swing voters.

Whether the success of the conservative Koch ad will translate to the top of the ticket, in a year where many down-ballot Republicans are wary of being associated with Trump, is another question.

The Sanders bump for Clinton is to be coupled with a heavily negative advertising strategy coming from both the Clinton campaign and pro-Clinton super Super PACs.

According to Ace Metrix, anti-Trump ads have a more negative slant than anti-Clinton ones. The impact scores among the anti-candidate ads, however, were almost identical.

Year-to-date, super PACs have aired a total of 147 TV ads, making up 45% of all ads. Bernie 2016 picked up 14% of the total with 44 ads, Hillary for America had 13% with 42, and Trump for President ran just 11 ads, making up 3% of the 327 total ads run this year.

NBC's Steve Burke expects Olympics in Rio to be the 'most profitable' ever

Broadcast Industry News - Television , Cable, On-demand - TVNewsCheck.com

Stephen Battaglio

The Olympic Games in Rio are 25 days away but NBCUniversal Chief Executive Steve Burke believes his company has already won the gold in ad sales.

After a press preview on Monday of NBC’s Olympics coverage, Burke told the Los Angeles Times that the company has hit its sales target for the Rio Games, which he said will end up being be "the most profitable Olympics in history."

According to Seth Winter, executive vice president for ad sales for the NBC Sports Group, the ad revenue total for Rio is approaching $1.2 billion, with orders still being taken. 
“We have never hit our budget in sales three weeks before the Olympics begin,” Burke said.

When asked how profitable he expects the Games to be, he said: "You'll find out when we release our earnings, but we're way ahead of where we were in London, and London was profitable. Sochi was profitable” in 2014.

NBC said the 2012 Summer Games in London brought $1 billion in sales.
The Games will air on NBC and across its parent company’s cable properties and Spanish-language network Telemundo for 17 days starting Aug. 5.

Winter said the Games in Rio are guaranteed to deliver advertisers a household rating in the “high teens.” Presumably that’s around the 17.5 household rating that the Summer Games delivered in 2012. A household rating point represents 1% of the nation's TV households, currently equal to 1.164 million homes, according to Nielsen.

The guarantees are based on "live plus same day" viewing and do not include DVR playback or streaming. While NBC is selling advertising for its digital coverage, a majority of the sales are for commercials on prime-time telecasts over the broadcast network, Burke said. 
NBC expects its prime-time rating for the Olympics to be higher than 2012 as all of the events will be live as opposed to tape delayed. But it’s the overall fragmentation of the television landscape due to the vast number of choices viewers have today that is making the Olympics more attractive to advertisers, Burke said.

NBC paid $4.32 billion to the International Olympic Committee in 2011 for the rights to four sets of Games — outbidding its nearest rival by almost $1 billion — and another $7.75 billion to extend the deal through 2032.

Burke believes that investment is paying off as programming that reaches the kind of massive audiences that the Olympics deliver becomes more scarce. NBC was able to command steep double digit increases over its 2012 rates.

"If you think between today and when London took place — television audiences are down 30%," Burke said. "There is a good chance that Rio ratings will be around the same as London, maybe higher. For an advertiser that wants to change perceptions over a 17-day period, there is only one of these, so it becomes increasingly valuable." 

Burke and other NBCUniversal executives said there are no concerns about venues not being ready in time for the start of the Games. Only a handful of employees have declined to travel to Rio out of concerns over the Zika virus.

“We are having an experience in Rio that is probably as good as we’ll ever have,” said NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel.

Lawmakers Question FTC About Ad Fraud

by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, Yesterday, 3:30 PM

Citing concerns that online ad fraud will result in higher prices for consumers, two lawmakers are asking the Federal Trade Commission what steps it's taking to address fake traffic on the Web.

"Bots plague the digital advertising space by creating fake consumer traffic, artificially driving up the cost of advertising in the same way human fraudsters can manipulate the price of a stock by creating artificial trading volume," Sens. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Charles Schumer (D-New York) say in a letter to FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez.

The senators add that many bots are "advanced enough to analyze consumer web activity in order to retarget advertisements based on individual browsing preferences."

The letter cites a well-publicized study by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers, which found that ad fraud will cost advertisers $7.2 billion globally this year.

"The cost of pervasive fraud in the digital advertising space will ultimately be paid by the American consumer in the form of higher prices for goods and services," they write. "Just as federal regulation has evolved to keep pace with the ever-growing sophistication of our financial markets, so must oversight of the digital advertising space."

The lawmakers ask the FTC numerous questions, including how to "reform opaque advertising exchanges" and what steps the agency is taking "to protect consumer data and mitigate fraud within the digital advertising industry."

Other queries include whether the FTC has observed trends in ad fraud, and what can be done "to more closely align the incentives of ad tech companies with publishers, advertisers and consumers."
Warner and Schumer acknowledge that the online ad industry's Trustworthy Accountability Group has taken steps aimed at combating ad fraud, but express doubt about whether the initiative will succeed. The letter specifically referenced TAG's "fraud threat list" -- which collects known sources of fraudulent traffic.

"It remains to be seen whether voluntary, market-based oversight is sufficient to protect consumers and advertisers from digital advertising fraud," the lawmakers write. "And in the interim, consumer confidence in digital advertising markets has eroded, as evidenced by user adoption of ad blocking tools."

Mike Zaneis, CEO of the Trustworthy Accountability Group, suggests that other agencies are better suited to deal with online ad fraud. Earlier this year the Trustworthy Accountability Group held a discussion with representatives from Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI. "We have seen it as imperative to partner with criminal law enforcement," Zaneis says.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Be Very Afraid, Facebook And Google

by John Motavalli, Columnist, Yesterday, 12:00 PM

On May 18, this column opined that Facebook would soon dump its media partners from their newsfeed, as the value of news diminished, especially in the social media context. Late last month, Facebook announced that news and media content would be greatly diminished in users’ newsfeeds, and soon after, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson counter-attacked, claiming that publishers would build “a powerful network” themselves.

The sound you just heard was my laughter. That has to be the most absurd statement we have heard all year. Moreover, it shows once again that despite all the water under the bridge since the Internet first reared its ugly head to media, powerful CEOs have learned nothing.
Let’s drill down.

First of all, we don’t blame Thomson for his remarks. What else can he say? In another column, we compared the current situation to the ’90s and media relationships with AOL. Ultimately AOL dumped its media partners also, or forced them to pay huge amounts to stay connected. Then, as now, media companies like The New York Times and Time Inc. simply didn’t know what to do next. A huge part of their current traffic has been coming from Facebook. How do they replace it? How do they explain when future comScore rankings show them plummeting?

In this current environment, even an Internet-spawned company like Yahoo! is at a distinct disadvantage. Why? Because unlike Google and Facebook, Yahoo! lacks a unique advertising edge, which Google and Facebook get from their huge traffic and targeted advertising opportunities. But Yahoo! is the No. 3 Web property. It still has value and, if Verizon combines it with AOL, it will have a lot more value.

Entertainment, Like News, Is A CommodityWhat does news and entertainment bring to the party? Less and less. What the story of Netflix and Amazon’s success in TV series shows is that entertainment, like news, is a commodity. Companies that had no experience in entertainment as of 10 years ago now have series that top those of Warner Bros. and Fox, which were both making movies more than 100 years ago. News became a fungible commodity back in the ’90s, when Reuters took advantage of the Associated Press’ conflicts. (Owned by a consortium of newspapers, AP was loathe to sell its product to potential competitors.)
Cut to 2016. Robert Thomson promises a “powerful network.” A network of what? If you can think of something, let us know in the commentary section below. On May 17, the New York Times published a typically clueless piece which stated, “The question of whether Facebook is saving or ruining journalism is not relevant here because, like it or not, Facebook is a media company.”

Another risible observation. Facebook is not a media company, does not want to be one, and is now taking steps to alleviate the confusion. It is a tech platform, and most importantly for its bottom line, an ad tech platform. As such, it can compete with Google by offering a highly targeted advertising environment, which only the two of them could do this well. How can media compete with that?
Does News Corp. have a killer app that will take the Internet by storm? Not likely. Nor is it likely that Time Inc., the New York Times, Hearst, Meredith, Viacom, or any other mainstream media property is likely to combine with News Corp. to build a rival to Facebook.

Frankly, media companies have not just a bad record, they have a non-existent record of achieving any tech breakthroughs online. And why should they? How many quality engineers do they employ? Oops, sorry, Google hired them all. Is entrepreneurship encouraged at Viacom? We doubt it.

Where Is The Go Network Now?Back in the ’90s, I spent quality time with Michael Eisner, then chairman of Disney, at the launch party for Disney’s online Go Network (remember that?), held at NYC’s Puck Building. In a rare moment of candor (for him), he blurted to me, “An 18-year-old in a garage in the Valley could build a bigger Web site than we could.” I swear he said this. And he was right. Where is the Go Network now? We’ll let Wikipedia summarize: “Go.com proved to be an expensive failure for its parent company, as Web users preferred to use search engines to access content directly, rather than start at a top-level corporate portal.”

And that, succinctly is the entire history of media companies online — expensive failures like Time Inc.’s Pathfinder, which a former top exec termed a “black hole.”

What happens now? Frankly, we fear the future. First, let’s say at the outset that if we were heading Facebook, we would do precisely what they did here. It was smart to use media brands to build theirs, and even smarter to jettison them when they’d outlived their usefulness.

But that doesn't mean this a good thing. Like children who refuse nutritious food and prefer junk, today’s young Facebook users are getting dumb and dumber. They don’t want news in their newsfeed. Even responsible adults often agree. I know I don’t want to hear about massacres in Bangladesh when I’m on Facebook.

Zuckerberg Is Not A MissionaryIf Facebook’s mission is to give its users what they want, then they’re doing that well. If Facebook’s mission is to educate young people, it’s misusing its power. But Facebook is a corporation; its mission is to maximize shareholder value. Mark Zuckerberg has done a great job of doing that. He is not a missionary, out to save media companies. He’s not even Jeff Bezos, who saw value in the Washington Post. One thing he has to know — the more Facebook is seen as a news outlet, the more it will be criticized by both liberals and conservatives for favoring one side or the other, as the recent contretemps over news algorithms proves. Far better to 1. Give users more personal fluff and 2. Avoid news controversy.

Let’s face it, News Corp. is not going to build a competitor to Facebook. When it bought MySpace, the social network was much bigger than Facebook, bigger than Google even, the No. 1 Web site. Under News Corp. tutelage, it deteriorated from a value of $12 billion to the point today when its value is negligible. MySpace’s former leader Chris DeWolfe has charged that the Fox Interactive unit forced MySpace to sacrifice usability for cumbersome ads that ruined the site’s functionality. If you’re on the edge of your seat, waiting for the Armageddon of a News Corp. vs. Facebook bakeoff, forget it.

(As a News Corp. and MCI employee in the mid-’90s, I was involved with a joint venture from those companies that sought to compete with the then-powerful AOL. It didn’t end well.)

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