Reaction Paper
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One of the most important parts of media management is the sales. Sales in the media world is like the fuel component of the car that allows it to function and perform how it should. Without it, television stations and networks will not have enough funding to operate. Our guest lecturer on Thursday, Steve, taught us a lot about the sales component of media management. It seems that as a General Sales Manager of one of the biggest stations in the region, he takes on a lot of responsibilities and roles. For example, such responsibilities include developing sales goals and objectivities, communicating with other departments, supervising, generating revenues, working with advertisement clients, and more. I also learned more about the differences between local advertising and national advertising. It was a bit tricky to understand through the readings, but our guest lecturer did a great job explaining the differences between the two and giving us a lot of everyday examples of the two.
One of the things that I learned about sales is that account executives have potential to make a higher salary than their supervisors because of their commission. Furthermore, I learned that the local AEs concentrate most of their sales towards customers, rather than products, which is referred to as “developmental selling.” I thought that the goal of salespeople were to sell advertising time. Another part of the local advertising that I learned were some terminologies that are important to the industry. The first term is “inventory,” which is the amount of time available for advertising. These inventories are then used to calculate the “sellout rate”, which refers to the actual percentage of inventory sold over a given time. In Chapter 9, the book covers more about the local TV revenues and rates. It says that the revenue projections depend strictly on three factors: the number of available spots varies according to the daypart, TV spots are tied to ratings performance, and the reliance on barter in program acquisition. When a TV station doesnt generate the promised audience, it gives “makegoods” to the advertisers to compensate for the loss. This is viewed as a negative rather than a positive asset to the TV stations because it loses inventory that could have been sold to paying clients.
In both national and local advertising, the inventory is the same. The only difference between the two types of advertising is that for local advertising, the spots are owned by local firms. In national advertising, there are two categories of ads, according to the textbook. The first is called spot, which is local inventory sold to national-level clients. The second is called network advertising, which “represent advertising dollars sold by various broadcast and satellite networks.” It is the biggest category for the cable industry. I also learned that the other difference between local and national advertising