Wednesday, May 20, 2009

McClatchy to outsource ad sales to advertising agencies

The Bee's Dale Kasler reports McClatchy has announced a new sales strategy to bring in more revenue, including a plan to pay sales commissions to ad agencies.

The McClatchy Co., seeking to reverse a steep slump in advertising, today announced a five-point sales strategy that emphasizes the Internet and seeks to reconnect the company with former advertisers.


In one of the boldest moves, McClatchy will begin paying sales commissions to ad agencies, a move that will "level the playing field" with broadcasters and others that have traditionally paid commissions to agencies, said McClatchy Chairman and Chief Executive Gary Pruitt. "We haven't done that for years," he said.


In addition, the Sacramento-based newspaper chain will emphasize the Web instead of its newspapers when it comes to selling help-wanted ads. The shift is a recognition of the severe decline in help-wanted sales and the fact that "employers and job seekers are using the Internet," Pruitt said. The print papers will serve as a "complement" to Career Builder, which is partly owned by McClatchy, and other online venues, he said.

Click here for more.

Nice, but car dealerships are closing and major advertisers are cutting back on their ad budgets. So who are the ad agencies going to get business from?

And, how many sales people will McClatchy lay off?
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.markturner.net/2009/05/20/no-omits-rival-papers-name-in-print-mentions-it-online/

Anonymous said...

This move is long over due. The problem is now, how do these agencies, who for years have sold against newspapers because they were not paid commission, position the newspaper buy to thier clients. Newspaper advertising works but because of the industry's greed they face a problem of building relationships with agencies that they use to tell to go to ..... That's a problem.

Anonymous said...

Q: "How many sales people will McClatchy lay off?"

A: "Why, the REST of us, of course."

Anonymous said...

If you're going to complain about typos in headlines, might bother to check your own first.

Kevin Gregory said...

Typo fixed, thanks.