Just like with other advertising platforms, underwriters who are considering digital sponsorship can have recurring concerns that prevent them from signing deals, whether they are skeptical about digital advertising in general, or perhaps have unrealistic expectations of what digital marketing alone can achieve.

Concern: Is Digital Sponsorship Generally Effective?

It's not uncommon to hear that underwriters have concerns about digital in general, or feel their click-through rates are too low. These underwriters may be accustomed to cheaper CPMs, and may have a dislike or distrust of mobile media.

Although digital is known to be effective and generates a massive amount of underwriting revenue, some underwriters have general concerns about digital and hesitate to allocate a portion of their budget to this type of sponsorship. These are usually underwriters who have a lack of personal experience with buying digital.

Response: Examples of Success

If a potential sponsor believes digital isn't as effective as traditional media, try sharing relevant examples and success stories. We recommend showing examples of competitors running digital ads; MOAT.com is a website that provides insights into where advertisers are running their ads, and can be a good source for advertisers, for example.

There’s one reality that every sales rep runs into when becoming a great digital salesperson:

You’re going to have to do some math.

To be clear, it’s not complicated math. And for those of us who do not enjoy spending our time working on calculations, I say: Don’t be intimidated!

Sure, if you read this blog post and never revisit the calculations, the formulas you need for digital sales may feel out of reach. But, if you write down these formulas, tape them to your office wall so you can review them - maybe even try some metrics-calculating practice sessions with your underwriting or digital team - they will become second nature to you.

Calculating CPM

Our first essential calculation is CPM, one of the most frequently used digital calculations:

Revenue = ( Impressions / 1,000 ) x CPM

This is one of those key metrics that everyone selling digital needs to know backwards and forwards.

It’s been said that we’re living in the Golden Age of Podcasting. This relatively new medium has exploded in popularity; those who listen are often super-fans. There’s a natural fit between corporate sponsorship and big-name podcasts like Serial and Death, Sex and Money. But for many of our smaller startups, securing podcast sponsorship is an absolute challenge.

If you haven’t yet grown your audience numbers to attract a business sponsor or your community just isn’t quite “podcast savvy,” there’s another funding option that might be perfect for you: securing grants.

The good news is that if you are a grant writer, getting a grant for a podcast is no different than getting one for any other project. And if you are in sales, making a case for funding to a foundation is much like making the pitch to a potential underwriter or sponsor, as long as you have honed your writing skills.

With many local advertisers shifting dollars to digital, it can be challenging to make the case for the value of broadcast. Local businesses may have convinced themselves that increasing the digital spend is the best way to achieve measurable results online. And many of them are doing so at the expense of traditional media buying.

But research shows that traditional media drives digital goals and there is a different mix of media required (social, print, radio, email, etc. ) to maintain current business vs. acquiring new business.

So how do you help educate your clients on the value of a media mix to achieve their digital marketing goals? What kind of proof can you offer that building their brand on digital is achieved by buying radio too?

According to an in-depth 2011 study by Ernst & Young that examined how global media and entertainment leaders define digital revenue, the conclusion was:

“The multiple interchangeable terms used to describe digital revenue – new media, online, internet, electronic delivery or interactive – add to the complexity of clearly defining digital revenue. They lead to lack of clarity of individual business models and revenue streams.”

I’ll say.

This study confirms the same struggle felt in public media. Without a standard definition, there are inconsistencies in judgment. As the Ernst and Young report notes, not only are there inconsistencies across all media organizations, public or commercial and large or small, there are inconsistencies inside organizations, between different departments within a single organization.

This issue was identified in the discovery process with Greater Public’s Digital Revenue Readiness Council earlier this year, as the group explored actionable guidance on digital revenue strategy. The challenge was noted in the council’s findings that were presented with the illustrated digital revenue roadmap at the PMDMC CEO symposium. Most council members’ organizations had their own definition of digital revenue but more importantly, they had a process in place at their organizations to assess it. That was the takeaway:

How each organization chose to define digital revenue was not a key indicator of success. The council believed that stations should define it however they want, but once they do, commit to growing that number.

While this conclusion mirrors the findings across other studies, the CEOs in attendance at the symposium asked for some level of guidance and an explanation as to what some of those definitions were. What are the different ways in which public media organizations define digital revenue and are there any conclusions we can draw immediately? The answer is yes.

Current practices fall into three trends...

When we look across public media it is important to highlight a significant point. Many, if not most organizations are not yet thinking about digital revenue in a significant way at all. Most are still developing a strategy to grow this illusive revenue stream as well as determining how they will count it. It is a chicken and egg conversation for many. How can we count something that we can’t define? For those who are thinking about it, however, some common practices emerge. They seem to fall into few broad categories.

TREND #1: Membership revenue obtained through digital initiatives is the primary focus.

Of the small number of stations that are actively tracking digital revenue, it seems that there is one immediate takeaway. No one seems to be counting all donations given through digital channels as digital revenue. The current practices are careful to note what initiated the action or “source of gift.”