Biggest Media Mistake By Company Size

👋 After 8 trillion conversations with media founders, some mistake-related patterns have emerged depending on headcount.

Company growing pains aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

The Ad Sales Mistake Spectrum

After talking with media companies of all shapes and sizes, it’s clear that size matters. Company size.

From my viewpoint, here’s the most common mistake made by startups, scaling and established media companies.

First some house cleaning rules, for these purposes of today, here’s the thresholds:

Startups 🐣 Defined as media companies with anywhere from zero revenue up to a few hundred K annualised. Typically founder-ran, maybe with a contractor or FTE. Audience size is small, they may have done some direct ad deals, but haven’t dialled it in yet.

Scaling 🏋️‍♀️ Revenue is typically $500k-$5m, definitely has a full-time team & divisions, perhaps up to 30 people. Ad sales is in full swing, but by no means a well-oiled machine. Audience size could be anywhere from 100k to millions, depending on the niche.

Established 👴🏻 Typically have been around for 10+ years, have a structured team of more than 30 people. In most cases will have an audience in the millions across various channels/brands. The bulk of ad sales comes from a few enterprise accounts that have been relationships for years.

🥅 Startups

Starting too early or too late. Yes, it’s a paradoxical problem, let me explain.

People with a paid products, e.g. premium content, info, etc, tend to start monetising too late.

Launching early will help you refine the offer and product itself, at very low stakes. Launching something which ends up being uninteresting to your audience is a much better mistake at 5k subs, versus 500k subs.

Plus, if you’re even remotely going big ticket, then a handful of sales will be meaningful, which is NOT the case for sponsorships.

People that primarily monetise with direct ads, often eagerly want to get going a bit sooner than makes sense.

I speak with loads of founders that have a 10-50k audience, everything going well, growth is exciting and people love the content. Ad is the only missing piece, they’re eager to get slinging ads and keen to hire us.

But, ad sales is time-consuming (or expensive), so before you start properly, you need to make sure that the outcome will actually be worth your time/money. Assuming everything goes well!

The way I lay this out to people is in this Monthly Revenue Potential Spreadsheet. Input their audience size, send frequency and expected CPM. Of course, this oversimplifies things, but that’s the point.

Before you invest time into outbound ad sales, make sure that it’ll be worth your time!

🎯 Scaling

This one is simple, it’s shiny object syndrome. Once people have organised success they look around at what else should they launch. A podcast? Community? Adjacent audience?

This was the core takeaway from Alex Lieberman’s talk at The Newsletter Marketing Conference. Plus, it’s nigh impossible to avoid Hormozi whispering words of focus on every other podcast these days.

The problem with this problem is that it’s often not terminal. Launching that new thing, won’t tank the business, it’ll eat into your bandwidth and constrain growth of the main thing.

If you’re a media company that has PMF and growing profitably, then just carry on doing your main thing. Don’t swap familiar problems for unfamiliar problems.

Of course, at some point diversifying media channels makes sense, but MUCH later than 99% think.

🤓 Established Companies

The most common problem from CEOs or sales leadership can be summarised by the following example statement that I’ve heard 3,874 times.

“We struggle to bring in net new advertisers. Our sales team are good, but they bring in 90% of their revenue from 20-year-old relationships, we can’t seem to motivate the team to hit the phones.”

This always surprises me, because start-ups yearn to have large audience size or brand recognition to make closing new business easier. But often when brands get there, they forget the art (or slog) of doing it.

Sometimes the fix is obvious, one example was along the lines of: “Our salespeople earn $200k base and $40k commissions, 90% of which is old business.”

The fix for this type of scenario is aligning incentives with business goals. Give people the opportunity to double (or more) their base salary, whatever it starts at.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps media companies do just that.