Selling against other media

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1989 by Helen Berman

Selling against other media

As a salesperson, you are expert in presenting your publication's benefits to your advertisers. When necessary, you're prepared to sell against your competitors' publications, positioning your magazine against their strengths and weaknesses.

But do you suffer from sales myopia? Are you aware of what other marketing and media options are available to your clients? You may be competing for your share of their advertising dollars against local and national television, radio, cable, newspapers, direct mail, the yellow pages and even outdoor billboards.

What is your client's media mix? How much of the pie do magazines have? Before you sell your own publication, you may have to step back and sell the unique benefits that magazines offer over other media.

Strategic positioning of your publication should start the same way all good sales strategies start--with your client's individual needs, problems and sales goals. Before you can demonstrate why magazines should play a significant role in your client's advertising campaign, you need to know why he or she has turned to other media in the first place.

What goals is he hoping to achieve with the other media, and how does that compare with how his company uses magazines? What can he achieve through TV and radio, for instance, that he cannot achieve with magazines? What can you offer him that the broadcast media cannot? How can he more effectively reach his goals by combining media?

These are some of the questions you need to ask your clients in order to compete for advertising dollars in a multimedia environment. They are certainly the sorts of questions that TV and radio salespeople are already asking potential clients in your magazine marketplace.

In fact, if you check around, you'll find that broadcast execs have developed some fairly effective arguments for selling against magazines like yours.

William G. Moll, president of the Television Bureau of Advertising, points out that TV "offers sight, sound, color, promotion and emotion," Since magazines "have no motion," he maintains, "they don't have the same kind of emotional impact" as his medium.

As a result, he believes that "TV can far better demonstrate the product or service and its apparent values to the customer. TV is as close to real life as possible." Television offers advertisers high impact with its creative opportunities, he adds. Plus, it can reach a mass audience with a single exposure.

Radio executives are no slouches at competing against you, either. "Radio is equal or better in targeting than magazines, but we're more flexible," contends Daniel Flamberg, senior vice president of sales, marketing and communications for the Radio Advertising Bureau. "Copy changes are faster, and the creative is dramatically more efficient to produce."

In addition, he claims that radio is "much more synergistic with major local newspapers and national TV media" than magazines are. "In conjunction with local newspapers and national TV, [radio] offers more punch than magazines."

How do you compete against such claims by the broadcast media? For starters, you can borrow a list that the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) uses to demonstrate the weaknesses of TV to the advertisers it tries to woo. It's a nice list that you can adapt to your needs when selling against the broadcast media in your marketplace.

According to the RAB, the following are some of TV's shortcomings: 1. The TV audience is fragmenting at an alarming rate. VCRs, computers, video games and cable TV offer other, competing, uses for the home TV set. 2. TV doesn't effectively reach light TV viewers; almost 40 percent of the population spends little time watching television daily. 3. About 96 percent of all viewing is done in the home. TV doesn't reach customers at work or en route to shopping, when the majority of buying decisions are made. 4. Prime-time availabilities are scarce. TV spot costs are high and rising fast. 5. TV production costs are high. 6. Viewers use commercial time to take a break from TV. 7. Commercials are "zipped," "zapped," "flipped" and ignored. About 18 percent of all TV commercials are zapped, when viewers switch the station to avoid the ad pitch. And 76 percent of viewers with VCRs don't record spot commercials, or they skip them when playing back tapes. 8. Commercial clutter confuses viewers and diminishes spot impact. 9. As consumer incomes rise, TV viewing decreases. TV misses many of your clients' best customers. 10. Television audiences decline 19 percent on average during the spring and summer. 11. Commercial messages are often heard out of sight of the TV set, limiting the effectiveness of visually designed ads. 12. TV is often recommended by agencies to showcase an agency's creative skills and to maximize production costs, which are a major source of profits for the agency. 13. TV has a small daytime audience (6 AM to 6 PM).

Aside from just pointing out TV's shortcomings, though, it is essential that you also educate your advertisers about the unique benefits of magazines.