A division of ad agency WPP castigates newspaper companies for not selling online effectively:
“With some exceptions, newspaper groups don’t seem to be marketing their digital assets particularly well,” said Adam Smith, the futures director at Group M.“Regional press groups, in particular, still seem to be overly focused on only selling in print.
“As with radio, the sales forces neglect their digital assets. The typical newspaper sales department still regards online as an exotic distraction, if they are aware of it at all.”
The report is about the UK but the same holds true here in too many newspapers and magazines. The many conferences I go to about the future of journalism and media rarely include the sales side of media companies and less rarely advertisers. We fret about where the money’s going to come from but don’t include the money people. There are exceptions; this was the reason the Online Publishers Association was founded. But it’s time to both educate and pressure the money people, for if you don’t lead the money, you’ll follow it as it goes elsewhere.
I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from conferences — there’s too much segregation between business and content, and your sample isn’t broad enough. If anything, the annual NAA and E&P conferences are overly focused on revenue and don’t spend much time on journalism. Connections in particular has been tightly attached to the general newspaper marketing conference for the last couple of years.
As Borrell’s reseach has shown, there are no U.S. typical newspapers, but rather clusters of high and low online performers. The low performers are overly focused on selling print. The high performers are the ones that are scoring 30-50 percent compound revenue growth rates online, and if you look closely you’ll often find online strong incentive/penalty packages for sales managers and salespeople.
To me, sales seems an easier nut to crack than journalism; generally you get the performance you incent. Maybe we should be docking the pay of journalists who measurably pretend it’s 1986 and supercompensating the ones have learned to use the Internet to listen. But on the journalism side we tend to resist management by measurement.
Hey Jeff,
Remember Iraq? You used to blog about that. Maybe if you addressed the issue, rather than shirked from the war you argued so vehemently for, people would read your blog again.
Thanks!
Alexander Litvinenko was killed by Boris Berekovsky -the Russian Mafia guy – whose house he lived in and for whom Litvinenko worked for. Berekovsky is the main beneficiary of the murder because 3 wekks ago the Russian police applied for Boris Berekovsky to be extradited to stand trial for fraud. Now Boris Berekovsky looks immune from extradition.
Also traces of polonium ghave been found at Boris Berekovsky’s offices.