This week’s Media Briefing checks in on the state of publishers’ advertising sales cycles and how clients’ lack of budgets, paired with tight expectations with timelines, is leading sales teams to increase their workload without a guarantee of a payday.
- One publisher said RFP turnaround times have decreased from an average of six days to four days in the first quarter.
- Another publisher said cancellation rates are higher than ever.
- Publishers are trying to determine how to not only sign deals but keep their thumbs on advertisers so ad campaigns start on their initially agreed upon day.
Advertising revenue was down in the first quarter but that doesn’t mean that the advertisers who are spending have been any less demanding when it comes to how fast a sales cycle can be completed — a timeline that’s been compressed even further by advertisers since the third and fourth quarters of 2020.
It’s not just the creation and execution of campaigns that advertisers are demanding publishers complete in half-time, however. One publisher who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the turnaround times for in-bound requests for proposal [RFPs] have also shrunk, adding that RFP volume is up while win rates are down — resulting in more work for less compensation.
“I’ve never seen a sales cycle like this,” said Orlando Reece, head of global sales at Insider. Starting in the third quarter last year, “it has shortened so much where before, you were talking two months, three months, four months before a quarter, you were doing deals and getting the deals ready. [That] shrunk to like, within a month, and sometimes within two to three weeks.”
Q1 advertising revenue ended “down a little bit” compared to Reece’s forecast heading into the quarter. He declined to disclose exactly how much ad revenue was off target, but did say his team was able to offset some of the deficit from existing clients and advertising categories by starting to sell within new ad categories. The only issue is that even some of the new deals were too slippery to keep in the quarter.
“[It was] really good and lucky for us that we did that pivot,” Reece added, declining to disclose which advertising categories his team began selling.
Now, publishers across the board are grappling with how to win over advertisers who have little money to spend and then keep them happy and locked in long enough for their campaigns to see the light of day — and for publishers to get their paychecks.
RFP frenzy
During the first quarter this year, the average turnaround time for an RFP was four days compared to six days in Q1 2022, said the anonymous publisher, but it was even more extreme with smaller-sized revenue deals valued at $250,000 or less.
“We saw an average turnaround time of two-and-a-half days versus five days in the previous year [for