Tom,

I'm also seeing the same type of tactics being used by sales reps during the many cold calls I receive each week.

Fortunately, I haven't experienced this behavior from the larger portals (AOL/Time Warner, Yahoo, MSN) or top notch news/finance sites, but with the smaller players it's a completely different story.

I started noticing a few months ago that I was getting pitched "laughable" deals from sales reps on a more frequent basis, so I started tracking the calls. Last week for example, I received a total of 13 sales calls from companies I haven't worked with, and 3 calls from companies I have worked with.

Here are the stats:

Out of the 3 calls from companies I have done business with, 2 of them had good deals for me that resulted in signed insertion orders, and 1 was rejected because the CPMs were competely out of control.

Out of the 13 calls from companies I haven't done business with, none of them resulted in signed insertion orders. Why?

- 2 requested 100% pre-pay with no cancellation - all were contextual platforms
- 2 requested 50% pre-pay with no cancellation - both were contextual platforms
- 5 were pitching garbage ROS inventory that completely missed our target demographic
- 3 pitched 100% pre-pay untargeting email
- 1 pitched $500 pre-pay, then net 7 terms for an affiliate network that didn't have any publishers yet!

so how is it that my reply was not placed on the site?

What reply would that be?

It's entirely possible that if you left a comment that didn't show up on the site, it may have been filtered out by anti-comment spam software I run.

All comments need to be approved. This is solely because if I didn't require comment approval, the site would be swamped with over 400 comment spams a day, and you wouldn't be able to read anything in comments except a flood of sports betting, mail order pharma and porn spam.

My original comment which was "filtered out" was, I never said "What? You want to negotiate this? Your CPM just doubled..." nor would I have found this to be acceptable behavior for anyone who worked for me. But I am sure that the image you prefer was and continues to be one of an arrogant powerful media person who abused hardworking media buyers like yourselves. What may have been said to media buyers who sought to make the Internet into a media buy based on a CPM so they could make it measure like interruptive media and avoid really using the interactive medium to its full potential was "CPM is a poor yardstick but if you want to buy based on CPM feel free to take the rate card and pick what you want. Understanding of course that the advertisers who bought based on a sense of partnership and had a commitment to make the medium wouldnt be buying that way and would buy much of the better inventory" Now that the medium has progressed in the direction of cpm buying done on a website the only excitement is to complain about the old days.

The promise of the medium is that it allows the consumer to choose as opposed to "be targeted" As I attempt to use websites I am amazed by the moving blinking screens that offer "branding opportunities" and other clearly unwanted messages that need to take advantage of low cpm due to the fact than no one wants to see them.

If you want to share your complaints about "stupid reps" and "unfair deals" feel free but if you want to insult someone who you've never met why not take a shot at someone who has worked in the industry within the past 3 years. I did my time in the industry in the early days calling on advertisers who took 4 and 5 years to figure out that the Internet was really here to stay and started to come to grips with the medium. The smart ones found ways to make their marketing more efficient and the rest added it to their exposure mix which was/is a good start.

I remember when I was a media buyer and my Media Director said "If you reduce media buying to a system so simple that a monkey can do it you may as well hire a monkey" I have come to believe that the same applies to selling. If sales people copy the arrogant behavior they have read about in books and articles we may as well replace them with monkeys too

If you talk to people who actually know me or worked with me you would be disappointed to find that I didnt treat buyers the way you have heard but then again I never treated sellers very badly when I was a buyer. I always believed that people who expected to get their asses kissed always felt shortchanged by people who refused to do it. They often mistake the refusal for arrogance.

Im just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round find someone else to blame please

Myer:

I apologize if I've characterized you unfairly - that was a bit of hyperbole and if you were offended by it, I'm sorry.

However, this has nothing to do with the treatment of buyers. It has to do with the treatment of advertisers. In the late 2000 to early 2003 period, many online publishers were hurting for ad revenue when many advertisers fled the market. During that time period, the online industry continued to establish standards - standards that aren't being followed today now that the market is back. IAB Standard Terms & Conditions allow for a cancellation period, which many of the larger players are trying to circumvent. And if you had looked at a list of buyer pet peeves from right before the crash, being force-fed undesirable inventory and being dictated unreasonable payment terms would have been there right at the top. It appears many of these publishers didn't learn their lesson the first time around, and I'm a bit worried that it will have a detrimental effect on the business.

By the way, we did meet back in the day (I celebrated 10 years in the online media business last September). We didn't have any direct business dealings, but one hardly needs that to understand what I meant in my original post. Much has been written about your negotiation style in the mainstream media, and word does circulate around the interactive media business about those deals in the early days. Let's just leave it at that.

Are you experiencing "hard sell" media reps selling CPM email?

I know that this is nothing new, but it's happening with increasing frequency. Everytime I see the "561" area code on caller ID, I cringe before answering the phone because I know that I'm going to be hard sold by a rude newbie rep who is brand new to the industry.

Not that I have anything against newbie reps in general, but I don't agree with how some of these people are being trained. Just like with dogs, I believe that there are no "bad" reps, just "bad" trainers and bosses.

The typical sales cold call selling CPM email drops (like one I received 20 minutes ago) goes like this:

Rep: Hi, how are you doing today?
Me: Doing great...

Rep: I'm calling from xyz company about the online advertising for your company. Do you do any online advertising?
Me: Yeah... millions of dollars per year. What are you selling?

Rep: We are one of the top list brokers in the country with an email list of 100 million. I can send out your offer via email for only a $0.15 CPM. You can start as low as $10k, pre-pay.
Me: Thanks, but I've already had a couple of failed attempts using your company. Also, I'm not interested in buying email on a CPM basis.

Rep: You obviously don't know anything about online advertisng, because email is the best and most responsive ways to grow your business. You can't make money advertising online without email.
Me: We do email on a limited basis on a CPA only. I'm not interested in running a CPM campaign with your company.

Rep: I'm sure you'll be calling me looking for for a deal when all your other campaings fail. You're crazy for not running a $10k test with me. If your company is even around in a few months, call me and maybe I'll let you have the same deal.
Me:

I'm a Brit, in 1994 I persuaded Myer Berlow to come up from Florida to NY to work with me at a large ad agency where he was responsible for new business at which he was amazing. I'ts sad to see uninformed comments about his style while at AOL - Myer was always a gentleman in his dealings with everyone, its also a tremendous shame to see that just a few short years later when interactive has finally started to dominate all media (especially here in Europe) that the pioneers who made right and wrong turns by trial and error are now being seen as less than what they really are/were - people with the courage of their convictions, an ability to think out of the box and an overwhelming passion that what they were doing had some meaning. I'm privileged to call Scott Kurnit, Myer Berlow and several other groundbreakers friend I simply wonder where todays wannabees will actually end-up if they waste their time disparaging the one's who actually wore the t-shirt:)