The New York Times’ recent reorganization folded programmatic sales into its overall sales org. Other publishers are taking less dramatic but similar steps in mixing their direct and programmatic sales teams.
For the Times, integrated means the direct sales team is responsible for hawking all of the publication’s ad products to all types of advertisers, with support from a programmatic operations team. Other media companies — including Meredith, Pandora and, more recently, BuzzFeed — have added programmatic to their direct sales teams’ portfolios, backed with programmatic operatives, but still maintain separate programmatic sales teams for private marketplace deals.
This integration of direct and programmatic sales is meant to address advertisers’ complaints of needing to deal with multiple sales reps at a single publisher. It’s also the sell-side reflection of people on the buy side getting responsibility for all kinds of media purchases. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without its own messes.
“The melding is going on because it creates one unified stream, but that salesperson now has to know two lines of business. And it introduces within one person disincentives of what to push forward,” said Dan Davies, svp and director of media sciences at Mediahub.
Read The Original Article: digiday.com
