A COVID-19 related fall in ad revenue has meant most media sales teams have been working overtime to showcase what their platforms offer advertisers, either clients who continue to invest, have stopped ads, or deferred spend.
Nova Entertainment has been showcasing what it calls its Home Truths presentation.
Nova Entertainment director of commercial strategy Stephanie Loupelis (pictured) has just finished seven days back-to-back of 60-minute web seminars.
The presentation wasn’t just about Nova Entertainment’s radio business, but a timely examination of the media and radio space. Which is why some of Nova Entertainment’s competitors managed to find their way into the calls, logged in under an alias!
The main question that Nova Entertainment wanted to address in the presentation commissioned from research firm The Lab was “How has radio impacted average Australians consumption of media?”
“When COVID-19 started the most requests we were seeing were requests for fresh insights about what was happening right now as opposed to recent survey results,” Loupelis told Mediaweek.
“We felt there was a need for an examination of the human impact, what does the lack of the commute mean for media consumption. Are people listening to more, are they listening less or are they watching more. What do all the devices in the home now do for them.
“It really felt like the right time to invest in some independent research like this.”
Sharing the presentation load was Nova Entertainment head of trade communications Tess Murphy. Loupelis credited her colleague, the author of the presentation, with the witty scripting.
The absence of face-to-face interaction has been a challenge to sales teams, most notably the reactions of smaller groups of people as opposed to a large online gathering of people on mute.
With a presentation running for 60 minutes, Loupelis realised they risked some people logging off part way through. “The research was initially developed as a sales tool for our sales teams. When we got into it the research was quite deep and comprehensive. We ultimately felt we couldn’t do it in less time. I know the ultimate sales appointment is 30 minutes, but in this case it wasn’t possible. If we’d put our five national sales teams on the road it would have been very difficult for them to secure that many appointments at 60 minutes. Doing it online let us do seven one hour presentations in seven days and we got close to 800 attendees. It has now set a quite unrealistic benchmark for client meetings from now on!
“I’m used to presenting to about four to six people, my new average is 100!”
Loupelis said online presenting will now become part of the regular sales process. “As we look at how to be a more efficient in business, why wouldn’t we use technology platforms like this as we are able to control the environment and make sure the presentation quality is very slick. We can reach a much bigger audience at a much lower cost in terms of travel time. In a previous time this research would have involved a national roadshow with visits to five cities and all the time and costs associated with that.”
Along with Home Truths, Nova Entertainment has a sales tool called Audio Opportunity which goes out to the market weekly. “It looks at key trends and insights with data from GfK and other data including updates on streaming amongst other things.”