Digital Offers Stations Trials, Opportunities

Station managers are being challenged on several fronts to manage their stations’ growing presence in the digital space, including training, hiring and compensation.

That was the consensus of a NATPE session on Wednesday that featured four station executives who are all involved in growing their companies’ digital platforms, with special (and obvious) attention paid to digital ad sales.

That includes finding people who know how to do it, educating those who don’t, and compensating them accordingly, the panelists said. The session was titled “How GMs Lead in a Digital World.” It was moderated by Ray Carter, VP-GM of WPXI Pittsburgh.

The panelists all agreed that the tension between their so-called “legacy” sellers — those who are still heavily involved in the selling of broadcast ad time — and their digital sales counterparts has decreased in recent years as digital has grown in importance.

Station managers have apparently found ways to bridge the gap. “We have our digital sellers and then we have our legacy sellers and we also created a position to help the legacy sellers more with digital [who] we call our digital strategist,” said Jon Conway, GM of WRAL.com in Raleigh, N.C. — a separately managed digital unit of WRAL-TV. As described by Conway, the digital strategist is a trainer and facilitator who helps legacy sellers learn the digital ropes.

Digital sales, however, require that stations come up with new ways of compensating salespeople, which usually means higher base salaries and lower commissions — for the simple reason that the revenues aren’t there yet for salespeople to make a living based on high commissions.

Digital sales compensation plans remain a work in progress, the station managers said. “Our comp plan has changed every year that I have been there,” Conway said. “We have realized that if we are hiring digital-only sellers, we have to have a higher base level for them than the competition out there now.”

“Digital is new. We have to entice [legacy sellers and new sales hires] to sell digital,” said panelist Alex Martin, EVP of WCAX Burlington, Vt. “You have to comp that differently because someone coming up just selling digital, they’re brand new and can’t really make a living on it on the current cost structure. So there has to be some base salary in there that they can work off of.”

Stations also have to invest in digital sales training, the panelists said, because salespeople who come to stations already experienced in digital-platform selling are in short supply.

Some of the panelists said it can be difficult to attract younger potential salespeople to work in a legacy medium like local television. But one panelist suggested that stations emphasize the positive impact they make in their communities — a trait that is apparently important to millennials.

“That’s how you attract a millennial,” said the panelist, Susana Schuler, EVP, operations at Raycom Media. “Tell them: ‘You can still make a difference. You can make an impact in your community’.”

In contrast to a few years ago, all of the panelists said their companies now understand that their digital efforts must grow, both in the creation of content and ad sales. “We just have to be willing to move faster than we move, which can be very hard in a legacy environment,” Schuler said. “But I really hope that we are out of the days when people don’t want to know about digital.”

“If you can’t adapt, you die,” said panelist Rob Weisbord, COO, Sinclair Digital Group. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s a mobile-first world.  If you’re not relevant in mobile, you probably won’t be relevant five years from now.”

To read all of TVNewsCheck’s NATPE 2017 coverage, click here.