Why Most Local Advertising Fails.

If you work for radio, TV, or cable, and sell advertising to local businesses for a living, you know how hard it is to keep local advertisers on the air. See if this sounds familiar. You attend some sales training seminars or perhaps your manager enhances your sales meetings with sales training tapes. You take this information and your best intentions and set off to sell local businesses. You go out and present your station or system, overcome objections, and close the business. Then what happens?

You get them on the air, the results fail to meet their expectations, and they cancel.

There are many reasons why this can happen. People are using media differently now than they did 5 or 10 years ago. It’s much harder for businesses to get their advertising to work. But most local advertising is doomed to fail even before it runs. Here’s why.

When you look for an A.E. job in this business, it’s listed in the trades under “Advertising Sales”. That’s really two different jobs. The sales aspect seems to be the one area where media sales people are trained most steadily. You learn how to overcome objections, how to present the station’s benefits, outline advantages over competitive media, that sort of thing. It’s important, no doubt. But how often are you trained in the art and science of creating advertising that works? Not much, if at all.

Wait a minute, isn’t that what the production department is for? (After all, you gave them “copy points”, right?)

Here’s the “Moose in the Room”. (The issue everyone sees but no one wants to acknowledge.) By and large, production department personnel are no more equipped to produce ads that work than you are…in fact, most of the time you are more equipped than the production department.

As I travel all around the country working with radio, TV, and cable systems, I’ve met with dozens of production departments. Here’s what I find: very often, they’re doing other things like working in master control or creating station imaging in addition to producing your ads. And (here’s the killer) most of them have had little or no training in marketing, branding, copywriting, or sales. They’re doing the best they can with what they know, but in this era of hyper-competitive advertising and clients demanding a solid ROI for their investment, most of the time the local ads fail to meet client expectations. And the client goes off somewhere else looking for it.

Over the next weeks, I’ll be spending time in this space talking about how you can make your local sales force into a local AD force. If you’re a local A.E., you’ll learn techniques and strategies that will help you not only sell more advertising, but keep it on the air! (Hey, there’s a concept!) The ideas I’ll bring to you will be ones I use all the time. I’m on the road, working with stations and meeting clients between 26 and 32 weeks a year. I analyzed the advertising of over 500 businesses last year alone. And trust me, I’ve learn a thing or two as I hope you will.

Bottom Line: No one cancels advertising that works. So, let’s get the advertising to work and let’s become famous for building our client’s business. When we do that, it’s funny how the selling seems to take care of itself.

Dave Burke is President of Burke Media Marketing, Inc, an advertising sales training consultancy. Dave works with radio, TV, and cable sales teams and their clients to help them dominate their markets. He can be reached at (603) 746-5588 or http://www.BurkeMediaMarketing.com