In my role as the Director of Digital Strategy, I function as a Media Supervisor for the digital department of a small ad agency. Basically, I’m a senior media buyer, and as such, I handle most of the new publisher relationships. This includes following up on client requests, whether it be for publishers/vendors who have solicited the client, or for specific sites or media that the client wants to run on.
Usually, this is pretty simple. If a client has been solicited, I call the vendor who solicited them, introduce myself, and explain that we’re agency of record, and they’ll be dealing with me and my people. By the time I get to the part about “agency with several other direct response clients”, the vendor is happy to deal with me. I’m probably going to result in more business, through the agency, than they would get dealing direct with client. And if I’m soliciting a specific media channel to run on, I just explain that the client wants to run there, and work with their new business people as per usual. 95% of the time, this runs smoothly, and we establish a working relationship, run the media test, and go on from there.
And then there’s the exceptions, which, shockingly, includes sites that apparently don’t think they need money. Take Yelp.com. Now, I’m a user of this site in my personal life. I post reviews and use it for reference to find restaurants and hipster bars. I even have the app on my Android phone. But Yelp.com is still working out their advertising model. And it doesn’t necessarily include agencies. One client wanted to promote specific locations of their business, and we had a buy all set up to test. And then we got to the terms and conditions – which made little to no sense. To avoid going into legalese, it basically meant signing the IAB AAAA’s…and then signing the Yelp user Ts and Cs that, in some places, directly conflicted with the IAB terms. I have no problem signing those Ts and Cs as a user, but if it’s a client involved, and they’re agreeing to terms like “termination of account without notice” or conflicts in indemnification and liability with the IAB terms, there’s no way my agency can agree to that. And when I asked to get the Yelp lawyers involved, I was told, flatly, no. Their lawyers don’t have the time to work out terms with agencies for local advertising. Now, if I wanted to advertise nationally, on the landing page, that would be one thing, but if I wanted to run with packages meant for local businesses, they just weren’t set up to handle agencies. Maybe I would like to advertise nationally where there were agency agreements set up? No, I would not, because that wouldn’t deliver as effectively as the local plan we had negotiated.
So Yelp loses out on the ad dollars, not just from a few locations from one client, but from many locations nationwide for that same client, as well as any other brick and mortar clients that we might want to promote. Since this includes a major car maintenance chain, it could have added up. Why wouldn’t they work with me, as an agency, to get past the red tape? They just didn’t care about working with an agency like mine. They’re making enough money selling branded home page placements to big agencies, I suppose.
This isn’t the only example of this problem, either. Some of the hotter, bigger sites out there do not want to work through these issues. Why would they? They’re turning down Google buyout offers and watching theoretical dollars grow, and don’t need the few thousand dollars in ad revenue they could be bringing in. But what happens when the bubble pops? Aren’t the thousands of dollars from clients like mine, times dozens of agencies, worth something in the company’s long term value?
And then there’s the big sites out there I can’t even get decent service on to sell me the ad inventory. You would think that some of the bigger networks, the old portal/ISPs who are now drowning (or preparing to), who have declining revenues and layoffs, would work to make sure that we’re buying as much as we can of their inventory. I’m one small agency – how many dozens of agencies, and millions of dollars, are falling through the cracks because we can’t get the decent sales representation we need? We could run so many more media tests and buys, and spending so much more with these huge, long-suffering sites. I’m not even talking about Aol here – our reps there are happy to help us. We could be spending so much more on both Yahoo and on Bing/MSN that it’s ridiculous…if only we had the kind of support we need to max out our search campaigns and our display ads. Instead, we get half-assed sales support, and are left to flounder and throw more money at AOL or Ask – sites that do support and help us with our campaigns. I wonder if Yahoo’s shareholders knew how dreadful the post-layoff sales support is, if they would demand that Yahoo hire some more sales people, get it together, and help my agency spend more wherever they can on the site or in the search.
And then, finally, there’s the publishers who just don’t get that they can’t go around the agency. I had a vendor try to convince the client to go around us last week, so that the client could get the inventory without the agency markup. I’ve had vendors contact clients multiple times when either we don’t move forward with them fast enough (usually due to test budget timing), or when their tests fail and we don’t renew the buy. Thankfully, we have loyal clients who trust us, as their buyers, to make sure that every opportunity possible is explored and tested (I do due diligence on every publisher, vendor and media opportunity that crosses my inbox). But while I’ll still buy media from those kind of sales people, provided it’s good media that’s in the clients best interest, a lot of my colleagues or peers in the industry won’t. Contacting clients behind our backs – or even in front of us – never wins us any points. And I fail to understand why the few extra dollars that publisher might make would be worth losing the entire deal by annoying the agency responsible for the buy.
As a media buyer, it amazes me how often I have trouble getting people to just take my money. Unfortunately, those publishers I have the hardest time with, are often the ones that will deliver the best for the client. In which case, I’m a salesperson trying to sell them on why they should sell to me. It’s tough. Maybe I should just start throwing more cash into networks and hope for the best.
A 
