Q&A with Ryan Dohrn, 360 Ad Sales Strategy & Training by Andy Kowl. Andy is Sr. VP of Publishing Strategy for ePublishing, the leading B2B publishing platform provider. He reached out to his favorite advertising sales expert for an answer to the question most publishers are asking right now: How can we sell advertising in today’s market?
Andy Kowl: What’s the state of advertising in publishing today?
Ryan Dohrn: From a 50,000-foot view, the ad sales business is dramatically changing. If publishers and business owners continue to sell the way that they’ve always sold, they are truly destined to fail. If you think back to the Great Recession, where we went from 12X contracts to six to three to almost nothing, post-COVID we’re going to see that again. It’s not that they’re not going to get any long-term contracts, but we’re going to have to be aggressive in pricing, and I don’t mean discounting. And those publishers that refuse to have digital assets as a part of their program are going to be in trouble.
Now let me just say, I am not a believer that print is dead. I don’t believe that. But if we keep selling the same way, we’re going to get traditional results, and it’s just not sustainable. We’re going to have to come up with new plans, new packages, new ways of pricing, be more flexible with business owners and provide a tremendous amount of value.
The biggest thing is content. If you’re a publisher and you don’t understand how to sell content or create custom content, you’re going to get left behind. The separation of church and state – it’s not that it doesn’t exist. But there is a place for custom content and sponsored content.
Kowl: Why are publishers pushing back on custom and sponsored content?
Dohrn: They actually think they can survive on nothing but ad sales. It’s not sustainable.
Read the complete interview at this link…