Local ad sales teams will be pressured to meet ever higher expectations in 2024. There are a few major trends that put the squeeze on broadcasters and their local teams. Many local advertisers are used to self-service through social media platforms, and like the autonomy, reporting and ease that it affords.
The rise of CTV has brought a new level of control, transparency and reporting to TV that has increased expectations for what larger advertisers can get on linear media buys. Add to that the urgency from the upcoming election year and the Olympics and local sellers will feel the strain on all sides if they don’t change their current approach.
There are a number of ways that local ad sales teams can meet growing expectations profitably, namely embracing technology that enables automation, scale, higher performance, and self-service.
The Shifting Face of Local Ad Sales
Many of the largest broadcasters announced major changes in 2023 that show just how much more complex local ad sales has become. Fox announced a completely new leadership team brought in to “leverage the power of Fox's strong news content, live sports and digital/streaming platforms.” Fox is one of many broadcast networks with a multi-channel offering that can make for complex ad sales.
Similarly, CBS named Wendy McMahon president of a combination of different assets that combines their 27 local markets, 14 streaming channels, radio and more. Again, sellers now have the responsibility of selling a rich portfolio to advertisers.
New leadership has also occured within top broadcast groups with the appointment of industry veterans Michael Strober at Nexstar and Brian Norris at Scripps as ad sales chiefs.
With critical events like the presidential election and overall political advertising cycle, local sellers will not only be looked at to innovate ad sales across channels, they’ll need to show growth and performance, too.
New Local Ad Sales Challenges
Advertisers and ad sales teams are approaching the same transaction from totally opposite directions, and advertisers have the advantage because they hold the budget. Advertisers look at a broadcaster and want to reach a particular audience and specific content within a particular price point, and they want to hit certain performance goals.
In order to accommodate these demands, ad sales teams are faced with a number of challenges that have gotten consistently worse as new channels have emerged:
- Disparate product and pricing information: Many broadcasters have different systems that house inventory and rate card information for streaming, linear and digital media, which means sellers need to pull information together manually.
- Manual campaign management: The amount of work involved with CTV and multichannel campaigns is enormous. A single IO may have hundreds of line items and creatives that each need to be manually entered into different systems with specific prices, audience segments and placement instructions. Reporting and end of campaign ture-ups can be just as arduous. This work can cripple a local team and eat into their ability to sell.
- Opaque and complex delivery: After the sale, local sales teams are responsible for driving campaign performance across different elements of the campaign. This might require shifting delivery instructions across channels based on performance reports. Pulling this information together across different systems can be so difficult and slow that optimization is nearly impossible.
- Slow reporting: Advertisers want to know how their campaigns performed, but it’s often too time consuming to provide information until the campaign is already over. This lack of flexibility can hurt broadcasters when advertisers are comparing them to nimble social media platforms and digital partners.
Ad Sales & Operations Tools Can Help
Ad sales teams want to provide better proposals to advertisers just like they want to have more control over campaign delivery. Completely outsourcing ad sales is one option, but it comes with a high margin, and reduces the inherent value within the broadcaster’s rich portfolio of multichannel content.
A better approach is to consider technologies that are built to improve the ad sales and delivery processes that have become so complex in the first place. From proposal building to creative asset management and ad trafficking to campaign delivery, ad sales teams should not be bogged down with manual work and complexity when their real job is selling ads.
An order management system, for example, can solve a number of challenges facing local ad sales teams. It can unify inventory and pricing information to help ad sales teams create better proposals more quickly. It can also centralize and streamline advertising operations and delivery so that ad sales teams don’t have to spend time with data entry or creative uploads. It can optimize performance, move budget across channels and provide reporting as needed. Order management also improves the end-of-campaign process to reduce errors and speed up billing.
Similarly, self-service tools that are powered by order management systems can attract advertisers who like the automated buying that they get on platforms like Google and Meta. With an easy-to-use interface that gives advertisers access to placement, pricing and delivery windows, local ad sales teams can dramatically increase the scale of advertisers they can service without having to grow their teams. This is especially valuable for smaller advertisers and repeat advertisers with an overarching contract.
These technologies are two examples of ways that local sales teams can reduce manual work, improve their ability to sell to a wide variety of advertisers and increase their revenue. It’s important that as the world of media evolves, that local sales teams embrace technology that can help them along with the market.
