The Difference Between Selling “Space” and Selling Solutions

Darren Herman has an excellent post here entitled “Goodby Media Sales Execs.”

Gulp.  Darren’s a good client of mine and his post follows a post from my boss a while back entitled “Ad Sales People: An Endangered Species?” Needless to say I read both posts carefully.  The power of a good headline.  What’s going on here?

These posts and the work I’m doing with the rest of the Federated Media sales team has lead to what I find to be an “a ha” moment:

Advertising used to be about the buying and selling of space (or time.) It is now about building branded experiences. In many cases, the ads are a small part of the equation.

I know, it was always about bringing editorial and audiences to life and connecting them to a brand.  But the primary “product” was always space or time.   It was THE solution rather A solution.  Now we are helping brands connect with advertisers in richer, more varied ways.  We are building sites, widgets, games, etc.  This is a huge difference that the industry has not yet caught up with.

I interview a lot of online sales people.  Some sell space.  They move inventory.  Others provide solutions and experiences.  I hire the latter group.

Advertising Salespeople a Dead Profession?

Always great when your boss blogs about your position becoming extinct… Fortunately, my boss Chas Edwards argues the opposite here. Now that my position is safe let me disagree with him.

Advertising will become extinct.  Advertising is a part of marketing.  Over time, advertising will evolve to look much, much more like media.  Marketers create media.  At which point, people selling “space” or “air time” (the slang used for generations) will disappear and the business will be full of marketing/technology/media consultants that help marketers make meaningful media.

Air time and space can be bought with online tools.

John Battelle: Networks Don’t Put Brand First

FM founder John Battelle has a great post here that focuses on the fascination with ad networks by the major media players chasing Google. A lot to chew on here and a really lively conversation starting in the comments section. Here is an excerpt from one of the comments:

… marketing departments are currently structured to CONTROL message, not ENTER a conversation. There will need to be a major overhaul of the MarCom structure to change this. Right now, Engagement doesn’t have an ROI, and frankly doesn’t scale on the level that they are used to. The organizations will collapse on themselves if they have to do what it takes to LISTEN as well as speak.

The first big time CMO that cracks this code and truly embraces this will be rock stars of the marketing community in the next decade. They right now are too scared about getting fired to sing more than a few bars.

FM works with marketers to create those “rock star” moments. A number of clients are doing just that. FM CRO Chas Edwards documents many of these on his blog Chasnote. A few clients (current or future) see the potential but get side tracked with the implications. They want the best of both worlds. They want a conversation and they want to CONTROL that conversation. I’ll paraphrase: “Yes, we want a conversation but we want it to be about the product and we want it to be positive. How do we get the world to talk more about our product?”

These conversations can and do happen of course but more often, a marketer will create impact and brand equity by joining a conversation about something the brand and its customers both value. If you sell dog food, support a conversation about how to keep your dog healthy. If you are marketing hotels for business people, underwrite a conversation where business people share travel tips.

Brands gain affinity by supporting the values they share with their customers. The irony is that these conversations are sustained by Google’s ability to efficiently (hell, it costs a publisher nothing) channel people to conversations of quality through its organic search results. The commercial success of Google is dictating the business strategies of the major online portals while Google draws the audience away from the portals to the more conversational sites (wikipedia, BoingBoing, Dooce, etc.)  As the audience leaves the portals, they need to pay top dollar to create networks that allow the portal to again control the inventory….