Don’t underestimate and don’t let advertisers overestimate

Wayne Ens wrote asking Radio Sales Today to remind radio salespeople to not underestimate your value to local advertisers. And don’t let your local advertisers overestimate their own ability to market their businesses.

Wayne says in the early 1980s he ran a small ad agency which at one point was producing and publishing 42 newsletters a month for 42 different clients the old-fashioned printed-and-mail way. He said his writers, researchers and graphics people did a great job of always keeping projects on target and achieving the clients' goals. Then along came desktop publishing.

All of a sudden his clients thought they could have a receptionist or a part-time staffer produce their newsletters and avoid paying agency fees. He says he lost 36 of the 42 clients to the new technology.

But a year later, he did a spot check on 32 of his losses and regained 29 of them as clients. Why?

Because in each case the client’s efforts had lost sight of their marketing objectives, and their newsletters had degenerated to junk mail or internal gossip sheets. They had confused quantity with quality, and went off the rails.

Wayne says: “You've heard the expression: ‘A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client’ or, as Roy Williams puts it, ‘It's hard to read the label from inside the bottle.’"