Jim Lyke just retired from a media sales career including 16 years as an account executive in Lamar’s Madison WI-Rockford IL office. Billboard Insider will run a series of columns where Jim talks about out of home sales. Today he talks about getting into out of home and the importance of using impressions to reinforce your sales pitch.
How did you find your way to out of home.
I had come up mainly in cable ad sales…I did that for several years, and then I went to network TV for a couple. And through people that I knew I had then gone to work for a chamber of commerce in Janesville, Wisconsin where I did lobbying as well as doing membership sales. Two of my chamber volunteers were employees of Lamar, and when they got a new general manager, they were worried that he would not see the value of being involved with the chamber. So they set up a meeting for me to sell him on being members of the chamber. And in the process of that, my ad sales background came up, and one thing lead to another, and he ended up offering me a job.
Three big changes in 16 years selling for Lamar.
We had just built our first digital board when I started there and we sold it like we sold perm boards. We sold six advertisers for a year and most of the advantages of digital – most of our advertisers didn’t take full advantage of that. Going from one digital board to twenty-four by the time I left was huge, and the positive impact it made on our revenue was considerable.
We saw our poster product go from paste and glue to posterflex. At the time, one of my co-workers said posterflex would never catch on. But now I don’t know any company that still uses paper.
A big thing was the switch from DEC’s to ad impressions. That was a game changer for us. Not long after impressions were available for the first time, we had a local McDonald’s coop that changed advertising agencies. There were members of the coop that were in the city and there were members of the coop that were outside the city, and the ones in the outlying areas were very concerned that they were being underserved by the advertising that they were getting. Because I finally had impression numbers that were specific to geographic areas, I could separate out where the viewership on this board is coming from and where the viewership on that board is coming from, and I was able to save the account and they continued buying at that level. I did a report which showed that the franchisees that felt like they weren’t getting served were truly getting the benefit of this billboard campaign. Having that Geopath information brought a new level of credibility to outdoor.
When I first started, when I was in TV, we didn’t ever think outdoor was a competitor. We considered our competitors to be radio and print. We looked at billboards the way we looked at someone buying promotional items, like pens with their name on them to hand out at trade shows. The perception now is that outdoor is a major player and the only form of traditional media that’s still growing.
Want to learn to sell out of home. Buy The Ultimate OOH Sales Guide for $69.96 plus $5 shipping. Order your copy by emailing info@billboardinsider.com. To learn more visit The Ultimate OOH Sales Guide.
[wpforms id=”9787″]
Paid Advertisement
