4-14-15
On the heels of iHeartMedia's recent launch of a new programmatic buying platform, CEO Bob Pittman provided a little more detail about his vision for how this will work for radio. Answering questions from MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan at the Media and Investor Conference in Las Vegas, Tuesday, Pittman said the process radio uses to sell advertising is from another era and programmatic will improve the process, match the advertiser's needs with what radio can deliver, provide advertisers with more data, and push radio to be more like digital. More like Facebook for example, where the entire process of buying advertising is automated. Here's what Pittman said...
"While programmatic is the talk of the town these days, there are still many people who simply don't understand what it is or how it works." Pittman explained programmatic will turn the buying process into an automated process. "Our sellers run out of time. If I can get them more time, they can sell more." Everybody who's sold radio knows what Pittman means when he talks about streamlining the process. It's the tedious time-consuming paperwork that salespeople rarely love to do anyway. If the salesperson is able to sell and the advertiser is able to see what he or she is buying on a dashboard, using data radio has never provided them before, the system becomes more efficient. Many people in the advertising community believe this is the way things are headed for all advertising.
Pittman says the process to sell radio now is laborious. And, he says, radio is competing for great salespeople who don't want to do all this paperwoork. "If the process is automated, we'll be able to do things we never imagined."
(4/15/2015 6:49:03 AM)
See AOL announcement yesterday of it's new multi-platform automated ad sales initiative, years in the making. Brave new world all around.
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