Better Upfront Presentation Tools for Ad Sales All Year Long
It’s encouraging to return to office and start planning for a next Spring’s Upfront presentation with all of its sizzle, glamour and excitement. It’s a chance for every media company to show off their properties, their line-up, their talent, their technology, their audience, and ingenuity.
“Hi! Great to meet you… in person… at this fabulous party. Let’s get down to business.”
Yet the media landscape and viewing habits have changed. Audiences are streaming, all year round, hungry for quality programming. Shows that started off slow get a second, and third chance to gain popularity and grow a broad audience over time – think Schitt’s Creek. Streaming platforms drop new programs all year round. All of the weight and pressure riding on the success of the Spring Upfront and Fall preview cycle is past. The pressure is continual.
Everyday is the Upfront
With a steady sales activity, it’s mission critical to provide Ad Sales reps the tools to sell all the time – to provide clients the quality of an Upfront presentation available from their laptop or a screenshare meeting anytime.
Here are a few things you can do, to manage presentations for your media sales team.
Slide library
Create a slide library, a central place that’s readily accessible, where your ad sales reps can easily find the slide they need. The slide library should have three things:
- Keyword search – They can input their terms and be presented with a range of slides relevant to their topic
- Slide Preview – Every file is formatted as a slide, ready to present. Not just PowerPoint! Videos, infographics, PDFs, research and data, all of it should be in slide format. This helps reps in two ways. First they can quickly see and decide whether it’s the right slide for their particular presentation. And second, they don’t have to do any additional formatting and design to it. Just grab it and go.
- Re-use & Customization – Ability to take slides and re-use them in their own deck (i.e.: drag & drop, grab & go, copy & paste). When it comes to presentations, every client and every meeting is unique to some degree. Good reps understand their clients’ priorities. Your slide library should make it easy for the rep to customize accordingly.
Interactive presentations
What’s trending on now? Whatever it is, it’ll change in an hour. Advertisers
need to be on top of trends which means their Ad Sales Reps do too. A rep can prepare a linear slide show the night before a meeting, and something could blow up by 9a. An interactive slide library, will
allow the rep to switch course, present any slide, at anytime, anywhere. For example, think of how you use the photos on your smart phone. Your friend asks about your vacation, and you start showing them
pictures (you’re actually presenting to them) of a beautiful sunset on a beach. Ad sales reps can do the same with an on-demand, Interactive Slide Library, except that they’re discussing ratings, or showing sizzle real, instead of scenic beach. Interactive presentations follow the conversation and empower reps to not only conduct more productive meetings, but to build stronger partnerships with their clients.
Data Feeds
Real time data, formatted in slides, that are updated every day, every week, every minute. Media sales is about audience delivery. And the proof is in the data. Make sure your team always has access to the latest ratings.
Reporting
A year-round sales cycle, requires year-round feedback. You need to know what’s trending for your network. Who presented which slides, videos, programs, to which clients, and when? Having reports in real-time, provides content programmers and ad sales marketers first-hand knowledge as to what’s resonating in the field, and then that knowledge can the used to make content decisions quickly, which in turn, leads to better content and better slides for ad sales reps.
Today’s media landscape changes in a second. Shouldn’t ad sales presentations change along with them?
