Ad Sales Pitfalls To Avoid In 2025

👋 Today, let’s look at common pitfalls people make and apply that directly to the ensuing year.

Squeezing in another ‘2025’ edition in Jan aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

🤷‍♂️ Opportunities & Pitfalls in 2025

Quick-fire things to do, and not to do in 2025.

🤒 Pitfalls

👬 Starting a broad audience.

Unless you have scale, plenty of funding (to achieve scale) or a genuinely unique angle to take. The supply and demand or the direct ad sales market makes broad audiences a lot harder to monetise.

🎨 Not customizing your sponsorships.

When selling direct sponsorships, you are asking for a premium from the brand (versus their other programmatic options). If you simply copy and paste the copy they give you then you’re not leveraging the direct/custom nature of going direct. You’re ignoring the strength of the situation. So don’t do it.

🤑 Not monetising early. But also monetising too early.

You can never start monetising too early.

The one caveat I have is that YOU CAN START DIRECT AD SALES TOO EARLY. If you’re doing affiliate, info products, consulting (etc) start from day 1.

BUT, if you’re manually selling sponsorships you should think about how much you can actually charge before investing lots of time in building a sales operation. I’ve written about this before, it’s a conversation I have with too many founders.

🕰️ Relying on ad networks for too long.

At various stages or situations, ad networks can be a great low-effort solution. Especially on your come-up. Whilst your ad inventory is simply to cheap to bother selling direct.

BUT rely on ad-network-only revenue for too long, the amount of revenue slipping through your fingers will increase to unpalatable levels.

I made a rudimentary chart on this below. At some point, the delta between the two sales methods becomes ‘worth’ investing time money and stress in acquiring.

🤌 Using ad networks if you’re niche.

Niche audiences are great. Sometimes the CPMs can be in the hundreds. If this is you, then using networks that might get you a $5 CPM is clearly a bad deal.

Despite this obvious reality, I’ve seen incredibly niche audiences not leaning into their strength.

If you have a great niche, lean into it, don’t use generic ad networks.

💰 Opportunities

👾 Gaming Newsletters.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, gaming is an underserved niche. Go get it.

🙋‍♂️ Be creative with your ads.

With the above pitfall, comes this oppy. For newsletters: Use the product, take a photo with it, hell make a Loom, go wild!

For others: Filming yourself using the product is more natural, but go super granular about why you like the product, go beyond the obvious.

🧳 LinkedIn ‘influencer’ sponsorships.

More than one brand has told me that LinkedIn influencer sponsorships have been their best-performing channel, especially in the B2B SaaS space. If you have a few thousand+ followers, include it in your offering!

🎪 Events.

From my view, brands are wide-eyed for physical event sponsorship post-covid. Probably because we’re all still particularly excited by IRL humans, having been deprived of them for a while. Ultimately meaning that brands perceive events as being a deeper engagement.

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