By Cindy Durham, assistant executive director, SNPA

Newspaper companies can't take a passive approach in how they approach the hiring of salespeople. They must implement a proactive hearts-and-minds marketing campaign in order to build what Charity Huff, managing partner of Maroon Ventures, calls the A-Team.

During the SNPA-Inland Annual Meeting, Huff shared proven, successful strategies to build a productive sales environment, maintain a healthy pipeline of qualified sales professionals, and reach new customers with compelling marketing tactics.

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Monster has entered into a partnership with Sun Coast Media Group, a publisher of nine local newspapers in southwestern and central Florida. The agreement enables Sun Coast newspapers to offer a wide range of recruiting solutions to better serve candidates and employers across its circulation area.

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AdCellerant has been selected as a preferred partner solution by The Local Media Consortium, a strategic partnership of leading local media companies. AdCellerant is an ad technology and digital marketing services provider, specializing in programmatic display, mobile, tablet, video, native, email and search marketing campaigns for local media companies.

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Gamut, a solutions-based digital advertising organization from Cox Media Group, has announced the introduction of Real Delivery, a pledge that brands and agencies will not be charged for invalid display impressions, as determined by long-time digital measurement provider, Moat.

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An SNPA member is seeking an advertising sales rep evaluation form. Do you have one that you can share?

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Newspapers recognize the importance of digital sales, and if they want to succeed, they need to focus on recruiting these reps.

"Digitally savvy reps and digitally focused reps are more important than ever for our business model," said Brad Boggs, senior director of interactive sales for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. "I think it goes without saying that upping the ante on digital sales is critically important for the future of our industry."

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It seems like most managers have forgotten the mentorship part of their jobs – if you listen to the voice of the sales rep. "He doesn't seem like he wants to help me out," a respondent said about his manager in SalesFuel's 2017 Voice of the Sales Rep study.

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By Susan Kantor, director, marketing and communications, Alliance for Audited Media (reprinted with permission)

The Alliance for Audited Media recently sat down with Dr. Augustine Fou, a recognized thought leader in digital strategy, integrated marketing and ad fraud research. In part one of this two-part interview, Dr. Fou shares his experiences with ad fraud, the bots behind it and how bad actors take money away from good publishers and advertisers.

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Reprinted with permission from the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism

What is the future of newspaper advertising departments in small, low-growth communities? Can the print sales reps at these newspapers become digital advertising experts? JoAnn Sciarrino, Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing at the University of North Carolina, explores these questions in a case study on The Whiteville News Reporter, a Pulitzer-Prize-Winning, twice-weekly paper with a print circulation of 10,000.

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By Steve Gray, vice president of strategy and innovation, Morris Communications

Yeah, sure – Big Data. We get it, right?

We all know that the digital age is producing huge amounts of data about consumers and their behavior. And, sure, we know that anybody who's in the marketing and advertising business – like local media companies – needs to get good at it. Right?

Not that we've quite learned how to do it yet. But surely we know – don't we? – that we simply must master it to benefit both ourselves and our customers? And we're working on it, right?

Well, I am. I hope you are, too.

Why? Because somebody is going to bring Big Data to Main Street. If it's not us, Big Data will be the next big wave of disruption in our advertising and marketing business. It's guaranteed to whittle down our local media ad revenues still further.

I've blogged about the huge opportunity and threat of Big Data for local media companies four times in the last 13 months. If you're a regular Media Reset reader, you may be thinking, "What, again!?"

If you're not a regular MediaReset reader, I strongly recommend that you catch up on Big Data and its local media possibilities here.

But I can't stop there. I keep digging deeper to learn more about what Big Data can do and how we can master its potential for ourselves and our customers. And I keep learning.

For the last couple of months, I've been digging into predictive analytics – a narrower niche in the vast expanse of Big Data. It's the sharp cutting edge that is making Big Data even more powerful.

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