The N/E/W/S for the Data-Driven Salesperson

We start a new Print Observer feature today, the N/E/W/S Report. Each
week we will focus on the Sunday, main news section of a small to midsize daily
paper in one of the four main regions of the country. The N/E/W/S (short for
North/East/West/South) is to provide ad salespeople and publications a snapshot
of advertising activity from markets that you can always appreciate, even though they may not necessarily be nearby. Of course, we hope you will find the
information interesting but we also hope you’ll see the report as a potential
model for leveraging analytics in your sales process.

• The ‘’Local Retail’’ category had the most ads (6) and the
  largest amount of ad space (43%.) The ads were also nearly twice as large as
  the average size of the ads in the main news section of the Sunday paper.

• ‘’Financial Services’’ had the second most ads (5), however
  all five combined only account for 2.8% of the total ad space in the section.

I’m sure you’re already well ahead of me as to how this
information is useful.

First, you can target ad categories (like travel,
non-profits, autos etc.) that are not already advertising in main news. But it
really gets fun when you think about how the data can be used to up-sell
existing advertisers.

For one thing, the data shows the relative ‘’share of
voice’’ of each advertising category. In other words, the “Medical’’ category
has 11.2% of the overall space in main news, while ‘’Real Estate’’ is 2.8%, ‘’Banking’’
is 2.5% and so on. Your existing advertisers may not necessarily care that the ads in their category are relatively small but they will likely find it interesting to learn just how much their ads suffer, relative to the other ad categories in the paper. Ultimately, it may persuade them to increase the size
(or frequency) of their ads.

Jim Jinks