target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e851129e-904c-53b2-af26-4f73832b807f">26 Thompson, Ben. 2015. Retrieved from https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation‐theory/.30 27 Auletta, Ken . Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) . New York: Penguin Books.
31 28 Levitt, Theodore. 1970. “The morality(?) of advertising.” Harvard Business Review, July–August.
32 29 Ogilvy, David . 1989. Confessions of an Advertising Man , 2nd ed. New York: Atheneum.
33 30 Levitt, Theodore. 1970. “The morality (?) of advertising.” Harvard Business Review, July–August.
34 31 Miller, Claire Cain and Bui, Quoctrung. 2017. “Switching Careers Is Hard: It Doesn’t Have To Be.” New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/upshot/switching‐careers‐is‐hard‐it‐doesn't‐have‐to‐be.html.
2 Selling in the Digital Era
Charles Warner
Digital‐Era Media Are Still “The Media”
New Assumptions for the Digital Era
Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics
Chapter 1 covered the Internet’s and Google’s disruption of the marketing/advertising/ media ecosystem. The Internet also disrupted the way media salespeople sell advertising. In his book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, Ken Auletta writes about a July, 2003, meeting in Google’s Mountain View, CA offices with Viacom’s CEO Mel Karmazin and Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google.
“Karmazin was among the first major executives from the old media to visit its headquarters. As CEO of Viacom, he represented the world’s then fourth largest media company – the owner of the CBS network, of TV and radio stations, Paramount Studios, MTV and sister cable networks, Simon & Schuster publishers, Blockbuster video, and an outdoor advertising concern, among other holdings,” Auletta wrote.1
During the meeting, the Google executives told Karmazin how the self‐serve online second‐price auction system worked – no advertising salespeople, no negotiating, and no relationships.i But what appalled Karmazin the most was the cost‐per‐click (CPC) pricing model that ensured that “advertisers were only charged when the user clicked on an ad.”2 It was Google’s ambition, the founders and Schmidt liked to say, to provide an answer to Wanamaker’s complaint that half his advertising was wasted. Therefore, Google offered their advertisers a free online tool called Google Analytics, which allowed them to track on a daily basis how many clicks and how many sales their search advertising produced, which meant they could easily calculate a return‐on‐investment (ROI) for their advertising.3
Karmazin’s CBS salespeople sold advertising based on the theory that advertisers “paid their money and took their chances.”4 Advertisers did not know if their ads were going to work, and salespeople sold on the basis of emotions, relationships, and scarcity, not return‐on‐investment (ROI) metrics. However, the Google executives thought they could design a better system, one that was measurable and fair to all advertisers, not just to big advertisers. Karmazin could not believe what he heard from the Google executives, and he said, half in jest, to paraphrase his actual words, that they were messing (not his actual word) with the magic!5
Indeed, Google’s AdWordsii was not magic, it just reaffirmed how the Internet had disrupted advertising, marketing, the media, and the fundamentals of all media businesses, as indicated in Chapter 1 in the discussion of the value chain and aggregation theory.
What Changed?
A 2018 article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Ads that don’t overstep” articulated how the Internet changed marketing and, thus, changed how media is sold:
The Internet has dramatically expanded the modern marketer’s tool kit, in large part because of one simple but transformative development: digital data. With users regularly sharing personal data online and Web cookies tracking every click, marketers have been able to gain unprecedented insight into consumers and serve up solutions tailored to their individual needs. The results have been impressive. Research has shown that digital targeting meaningfully improves the response to advertisements and that ad performance declines when marketers’ access to consumer data is reduced.6
Mel Karmazin’s magic has been replaced by data, which some experts have called the new oil, and which has made buying and selling media infinitely more complicated than it was before the Internet allowed marketers to micro‐target consumers based on their Internet browsing and searching behavior and their intention to buy a product.
Complex digital‐era selling requires new assumptions and approaches to media buying and selling, which we will examine in this chapter.
Digital‐Era Media Are Still “The Media”
Even though the Internet spawned new ways to create, publish, and distribute news and entertainment content and new ways to buy advertising programmatically, the newly created media platforms such as Google and Facebook are still perceived to be “the media” by the public. The media, including digital media, are ubiquitous and powerful, and they transmit advertising, political, cultural, social, and moral messages (either intended or unintended) to a mass audience. Over the years “the media” has been under attack from both the right and left of the political spectrum. In the 1960s,
