“Sell me this pen.” I know it’s awful to start with a bromide seller like that. But, at 6am, they can’t all be gems. OK, forget the pen. Sell me you. Take eight seconds to think up the four best things you can say about you. It should be easy. It’s amazing how many of today’s media companies can’t sell ads on their own platforms. Or, they won’t. Which is a big reason why they are where they are.
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Many years ago, when I got into media, publishers sold their own ads. The horror. Media execs figured out important things about who read, listened to, or watched their media.
It worked like this. Pretend you were a sales person at the leading sports magazine of the 1980s, Sports Illustrated. You could rattle off key stats like Jean Valjean knew he was prisoner 24601 and, I presume, how Oppenheimer could rattle off 3.1415926535. “Our average reader is 34 years old, 95% of them are male. He’s married, makes $42,312 a year, has one kid, one more on the way, drives a 3-year old Ford, his wife drives a six-year old Dodge, and they live in a house with a white picket fence on Shady Lane. He prefers imported beer, golfs once a week, and bowls a 173 most weeks in his league.”
$42,312 doesn’t sound like much but when SI was a big deal, that was comfortably above average. Keep in mind, this was before digital media and before digital data brokers. This hard-won data in your expert sales hands turned empty pages into vaults of gold.
Watch.
You walk into a meeting with marketing person from Ford. Armed with an armful of glossy magazines. Bookmarked to pictures featuring pretty cars and, maybe a pretty girl. Again, this is the 80s. That was OK. “Hey, you need to sell cars. I have 3.14159 million readers this week. Every week. Three million are men. He drives one of your Fords. His car is three years old. He needs to replace it in a year or so. His wife is driving an even older Dodge. They have a kid on the way. They’re going to need something newer, something safer for that new mom. Put your ad in SI. It’s a proven winner. A Marquis luxe for his next drive. A Taurus for her. Front wheel drive safety. Displace Dodge.”
I wasn’t there, but I do know, in its prime, SI sold a lot of ad pages. At pretty big prices. So, we know the whole thing worked. Worked well.
Now fast forward to the early digital days. You’re still selling SI ads. We get this many visitors. These are the key stats. Your ad goes here. Glossy magazines scream: I’m out of touch. Instead, some icky PowerPoint slides show lo-res pictures of SI.com. A website made with duct tape even ickier HTML code. Ads the size of postage stamps sell for pennies. Early digital ads had no data.
Google shows up. Walks into your client at Ford. They have data. “We know when someone searched for a car. We know what car they searched for. We can intercept someone looking for a Dodge with a Ford ad. Better, we know their price point, where they live, and what color shoes they just bought. We can put the right Ford ad in front of them. Sign here.” Killer pitch. For their own product. Google sold LOTS of ads.
Then, Google got even smarter. They started selling their ad sales services to your boss at Time, Inc. “Why sell your own ads when we can sell them for you?” Your boss has a fancy title and knows their sales numbers were flagging, nodded, “Compelling. Go on.”
Google went on. “When someone arrives at your site, you let us know. It’s called a cookie. Those cookies tell us all the places they’ve been. We have a journey. We couple that with a whole lot of data we have about that person. Bamm-o! We get more money for the ads on your site than you do. Yes, we take a cut. But, all of this is better than you having your own sales force.”
Guess who’s out of a job? You.
That, in a nutshell, is how programmatic ads work. It all makes sense. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. It evolved. Supply side platforms know what ad inventory publishers have. Demand side platforms know what ads folks at Ford want to buy. Machines run auctions to maximize the bid. Ubiquitous cookies tracked our every digital move.
But, here’s where rubber meets road. In 2016, a website called Talking Points Memo (TPM) had someone (mostly Google) sell $1.7M in programmatic advertising. In 2017, that was down $1.3M. It’s been downhill ever since. Last year TPM sold $75,198 of programmatic ads. It’s tough to run a business with 96% less revenue.
It’s easy to say ad sales are down because they are better news sites for those ads. Maybe Politico or the New York Times. It’s almost as easy to say ads are way down because news — in general — doesn’t compare to placing ads on social platforms or on Google.
Their Willy Loman packed his bag a long time ago. Like most publishers, TPM flipped the toast lever down the moment they outsourced sales. They got burned. There are no people in sales at TPM who have stats to weave a story about why someone should advertise with them. In fairness, there may not be anyone to talk to. A buying machine plugged into an analytics machines makes the decisions.
Publishers gave it away. As radio morphs into podcasts, podcast ad networks that handle sales. As TV moves online, they’re beginning to take video ads from some programmatic ad network.
They all lost the plot. Which is this…
Nobody sells you better than you.