(By Brian Winnekins) I read the recent article about how an agency feels about radio, and from a small-station owner’s standpoint I felt the need to respond. I have to say that what the California agency said about how station reps and managers have treated them is sad and makes me upset for many reasons. I was taught early in my career that relationships matter.
A bit about my station. We are a standalone AM in rural Wisconsin and we are heavy in local news, local high school sports, farm news and markets…an old-fashioned full-service AM. My station had been on and off air for many years before I took it over in 2012, and since then we have made the station viable not only for our listeners but also for our clients.
We certainly don’t do things the way the California agency described station reps. We treat clients with respect, listen to their needs and concerns, and try to find ways to work with them. Over the years it seems like radio has decided to skip the sales training and just have “order takers” and call them salespeople. I still do things “old school” by scheduling agency visits at least once a year to visit with reps face to face to give them updates on our station, and with new agencies to introduce them to what our station offers. I’ve also been willing to work with agencies to develop plans that would work for their clients, and frankly some of my best and most popular plans have been from working with a media buyer to develop something that works for their client and our station.
How did we get to this point where agencies and radio reps treat each other with little respect? I have to say that over the years my hardest client has become one that is an agency. My experience with many agencies over the years has been the following…
- Not phone calls or emails. I’ve contacted agencies about our station just asking for a 30-minute meeting to see if our station would be a fit for their client. I always tell them up front that if we are not a fit, no harm. I can’t count how many times I didn’t get a reply or return phone call.
- Not following through. There have been many times that I have met with an agency and they respond that in the next planning stage we should submit a proposal. So I follow up later in the year, at the time they suggested, and have been told, “Sorry, we decided to plan early and our next year’s budget has already been allocated.” Gee, thanks for telling me. I have also had the experience of scheduling a meeting with a buyer, only to get to the agency and being told, “The buyer has another meeting and won’t be able to see you.” Instead, I meet with an intern or an assistant-assistant-assistant person. A waste of time and money for me.
- Asking to lower rates. I get the email from the agency asking for rates for a client. There is no mention of who the client is or even what the client’s business is. All the agency wants is rates…nothing more. I send the rates and then get the response that I need to lower my rates because the metro stations are lower. Never mind the fact that the metro station is a group and is charging $49 a :30 and spreading that out over seven stations for an average rate of $7, and four of those stations will give no benefit to the client. It’s also just a tad hard to put something together when all that I was asked for was rates for a “client” that wants to have a “campaign” in the next month.
- Asking for free stuff. This is one area that just gets me mad, but radio sales needs to share the blame for agreeing to all this “value added” garbage and thus lowering the value of radio as a whole. As a farm broadcaster, I do attend many different conventions, etc. The instant I register for the conference, my email lights up like a Christmas tree with requests from agencies to stop by Company A’s booth to do an interview about some new or amazing product that my farm listeners would be interested in. So I respond that I do have a package available for just such a request. The reply is “we are the PR agency, you need to contact the advertising agency.” So I contact the ad agency and, if I get a response, it’s usually, “Oh we have no budget for that” or “Your station is way too small for us to do a buy with, but we would really appreciate it if you would stop and do an interview.” Seriously? So my station is not worth the buy, but it’s valuable for the free interview? Plus, what do I tell Company B who is Company A’s competitor — and who DOES advertise with my station? That I’m giving Company A a free interview? Why can’t the PR and the ad agencies work together?
- Slow pay. I get the buy and run the schedule as requested. I send in all the correct paperwork and I have to make a call 90 days later asking for payment. The normal response is “Oh our accounting department is working on it.” No offense, but I can’t tell the electric company or BMI or ASCAP or other bills that “The agency is processing our advertising invoice and when I get paid you will get paid.”
- Asking for free coverage. So an agency calls and tells me Company A is having some fundraiser or other “non profit” event at their business and want us to cover it, with either a “news story” or some “plugs on air.” The agency won’t buy us because “we are just too small” but want something free. Meanwhile, that agency buys a big ad in the newspaper. Sorry, but my those I owe money to are not going to say, “Well Brian, you were so nice to cover that fundraiser that we are going to take a chunk off your bill.”
- Making terrible buys then blaming me. I had an agency wanting to make a buy and be a sponsor of my farm programming. Great! So I get the buy — one time per day for four weeks and please rotate the following 10 commercials. I called the buyer and suggested we only run one of the commercials and/or up the schedule. Of course, the response usually is “That’s what the client wants” or “That’s all we have for budget.” When the campaign doesn’t get the response they expected then it’s my fault. Since that happened I have now turned down buys like that as it makes my station, and radio as a whole, look bad.
- Wanting the “agency discount.” Why do agencies think they deserve a discount and then charge the 15%? Sure, I’m willing to give a discount for a bulk purchase. I offer that to all my clients, but an additional discount? Okay, I’ll do that if the agency gives me a “local radio” discount and drop the commission to 7.5%.
I get to deal with all of the above and then have to pay the agency 15% for the privilege. Yes, radio salespeople have plenty of issues to deal with, but so do the agencies. From treating radio like nothing more than a commodity to not showing any respect to the stations, to just buying coverage areas or price per point instead of content, there are things agencies can do too to improve our relationships. After all, isn’t it in both radio and the agencies best interest to make the CLIENT happy and successful?
Brian Winnekins
WRDN Radio
Durand, WI
[email protected]
Are there any reasons – I mean, good reasons – for outfits to tolerate this kind of abuse? Plus, as a small reminder: If they come pouring out of clown cars, chances are they are clowns.
Maybe adopting a strategy of improving the on-air and commercial production aspects at the local level might be of more value.
I’m so glad to read this. I have handled the same thing repeatedly from agencies including a very snotty rep who told me that she would tell me my rate based on what she thought I was worth! Um…no.
Also Coc Cola is one of my biggest pet peeves. This is a billion dollar company and yet they want buy one get one free AND added value. Again…um…no. Until all of us start valuing radio enough to say No…it will continue.
In a class I took with Sean Luce he said that if you have to give away more than 10% of the value of the buy to get the sale then you need additional sales training. I give away nothing because I believe in radio.
If ever I felt alone, reading the comments on Brian’s article pushed it all aside.
I am keeping this article….excellent, and spot on. Is there an agency school somewhere they teach these aggravating behaviors?
Here’s the way we play it….The agency gets one shot! Then …we will go directly to the client with our best idea! And explain …Your Rep was too busy to see us or listen to the idea. We didn’t want this opportunity to go to anyone else till you heard it! Believe me
the agency will get mad, but like a dog…They learn very fast NOT to jerk you around anymore…. and give you the proper attention! 90% of agency’s are old radio folks…They will get it!
Agencies do what is best and easiest for them-
Plain and simple!
Like stock brokers.
LAZY LAZY LAZY
the small guys who understand personal relationships are the ones keeping this industry alive!
A clarifacation,
My wife, after spending time as a radio salesman, a print salesperson, an AE at a medium sized agency and then the VP of of marketing for a large retailer with a multi million dollar budget made a conscious decision when she started her business to work with a certain category of client. Her client list for the most part is not appropriate for radio, what is radio going to do for a high end family practice law firm? The lawyer who owns the firm isn’t interested in being the biggest divorce attorney in the state or county or city.
My wife’s agency by design, is a boutique. With a few exceptions her clients are high end. (she has a small resort client that charges $1,100 a night and does extremely well in that rarefied market.) Two of her clients are restaurant groups, they are the radio targets. She has explained over and over to radio reps, that what the restaurant group is interested in is not a spot schedule but involvement in community events, art and entertainment events, fund raisers, etc. The stations keep coming back with spot schedules. Geographically her clientele is coastal and runs from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara. She has three clients outside of California, the resort and two specialty sport clients, hockey and lacrosse, in the Midwest. She now has an international client and handles their marketing in North and South America.
I spent much of my life selling radio, I understand the frustration with agency practices. What I would never do is to keep trying to sell an inappropriate product to the principle of an agency after I’ve had it explained in detail what the clients, wants, needs and desires are.
If you are only fulfilling client needs and not coming up with ideas and suggestions then, you are only a media buyer not an agency. I wish these people would quit saying they are an agency when all they do is “buy what the client wants”
Totally Agree about agencies. I was feel frustrated because i thought it was my market.
we are Ritmo Broadcasting and we had Radio Stations on Delaware , Philadelphia and South Jersey and still not a Single Regional buy for any of the markets. 🙁
Big Box stores with their newspaper inserts and ZERO radio coverage show me the Agencies have no respect. We had a major furniture chain that bought ads down in the “big city” where there are lots of stations and rates are expensive. But they would not buy up north to support our local store where there are few stations and rates are much lower. Guess there wasn’t enough commission in it for them to do the extra work. The store GM railed how much he wanted radio to stimulate traffic and was told to leave it up to the Agency. The whole chain went belly up about two years ago. One day a week in the paper is horse and buggy but it is pervasive. TERRIBLE!
It’s not just the little stations, Brian.
I hear quite a bit from folks at large station groups in major metros who are essentially getting the same crap treatment from a lot of the agencies, even when those big stations can ‘show the numbers’.
As others have said, do NOT rely on the agencies to bring in the revenue for your station. We simply have to build the personal relationships at the local level, with local companies, who understand, just as we do, what it takes to make for a successful business, each and every day.
If KCAA had to depend on agency business, we would have been dead and buried before we started. Years ago, i got so fed up with agencies and their brain dead buying habits that I made a bit and put it on the air. In the bit, our GSM would approach Ms. “Led” at the “Clueless” Ad agency. Regardless of the details he provided about KCAA, Ms. Led had only one response. “Yes, but what are your Arbitron ratings” or “Your station has no listeners because I don’t see it on my list”…The GSM would go on to explain that we don’t buy the book and the current agency buys were leaving out all of KCAA’s listeners which is unfair to their client to which Ms. Led would respond, “but your not on my list of the stations we buy, I’m sorry.”
How can we have any respect for them when we know their system of radio buying is based on a garbage heap of flawed and incomplete data.
Here is an example of how bad things are screwed up. We have video productions at KCAA that receive up to 5,000 organic views a week and our podcast system receives over 250,000 hours of listening each month from a universe of about 8,700 people. We have three terrestrial frequencies on the air and that does not count our social media. Yet, with all of that, we only have one agency that buys us and they pay the lowest rate on the station.
From my point of view, the whole system of agency radio buying is rotten to the core. If I had the youthful energy to do it, I would organize a class action against Nielsen and every ad agency that buys radio from the book because we can easily prove in court that the current system is fatally flawed.
Just imagine how many dollars are wrongly allocated by media buyers every day. Imagine how many more radio stations would prosper if they received an accurate pro rata portion of agency media buys.
What makes Nielsen now any different that JD Power or Who’s Who? It’s “pay to play” masquerading as research.
I am now Fred Lungren’s “GSM” and while I missed the sketch, I agree with him completely. Remember that radio only pays agencies 15%. Print at most agencies can get them 50% after the artwork, photography, pre-print, etc. They don’t care if they can produce results for the client, only that they can show him “numbers”
Preach on. It is disconcerting to me to see the disservice agencies do to their clients when their primary concern is below SQAD CPP. I grew up on radio with the idea it was important to find the right clients for the right station – back in a time when buyers AND planner AND AE’s felt it was important to understand who a station audience was – not just how many. They came to station events, considered Scarborough qualitative an important element and didn’t feel like the best way to make the buy is go down the ranker and buy as many stations that will meet their CPP’s.
We are in a market with 28% black population – top two stations are urban – good stations – our competitors … Unfortunately I see many agencies will buy 2 or 3 urban stations(with 50% and higher duplication) in a 4 station buy even if only 1 of 10 of the advertiser locations is in or near the HDBA.
Not a good set-up for getting ROI for advertiser . And then they’ll say ‘radio didn’t work”.
Amen, then another is there are the millions upon millions the State spends in advertising but not on small stations.
How about when all they do is take last years order and change the dates, with the goal of putting as little work into the order as possible.
I have one agency that constantly asks me to “take this below rate card order now”-with the promise of a better order coming”
I am still waiting for the better order.
Or the ones that can’t look beyond rankers, and just buy the numbers-
It is to much work for them to look at a station that does not subscribe to rip off rating services, even if the station is perfect for the client.
so many more…….
Amen and amen! I would add one point: if agencies really wish to serve their clients, they’ll develop a better method for qualifying radio audiences, rather than just quantifying them. I firmly believe that 10 devoted listeners to an involved station such as Brian’s are worth at least 30 casual listeners to an “another 12 songs in a row coming up” clone. How do we, as community broadcasters, better promote the quality of our audience?
Hang in there Brian!