• by Jim Meskauskas , October 13, 2004

If you are working in this industry, the news that business has really picked up - and continues to pick up - has long since been wrapping fish.

Sales organizations can't hire new, talented sales staff fast enough and agencies are holding séances to find help in their media departments, not caring if it comes from the living or the dead.

Of course what all this increase in business means is that spending is up, up, up.

As we all learned during the Interactive Advertising World Conference at the end of September, Internet advertising revenues for the U.S. was approximately $4.6 billion for the first six months of 2004 - a 39.7 percent increase over the first half of 2003.

Internet advertising revenue totaled approximately $2.37 billion for just the second quarter of 2004. This makes online advertising bigger than Outdoor and probably even Network Radio (though I don't have those numbers, so if someone out there does, let me know!).

So, where's this money going? Well, if you saw the news this week regarding Yahoo!'s earnings for quarter three, search marketing and the big publishers are getting it. Taking into account an increase in spending, the acquisition of paid search engine Overture and, according to a story I read, some sale of stock in Google, all contributed to Yahoo! almost quadrupling their third quarter profit. Yahoo! reported a rise in third quarter net income from $65 million in 2003 to $253 million in 2004 and an increase in revenue from $357 million to $907 million.

My guess is that all the major publishers are experiencing similar up-ticks in revenue. And I am happy for them. Those of us still around have been believers in this business long before there was evidence for it. The publishers, writers, agency personnel, and advertisers who were in it from the beginning started with faith before proof. Everyone deserves good things to happen to them.

My fear is that this robust improvement however, is going to bring about some of the bad habits of the past as well as unduly influence the future.

Following is a list of things I hope the major publishers watch out for before the dollar signs blur their visions and dreams of avarice are mistaken for a state of reality:

Don't let big pockets lead to big egos. Remember the good old days, when sales staffs at Yahoo! and AOL and others of their ilk would condescendingly mention that they had 10 other deals many times the size of the deal you were discussing with them to make you feel that you were either wasting their time or doing you a favor just talking with you? Let's try to avoid that this time. Memories are short when times are good, but not so long ago times were bad, and some of the people you dealt with during touch times would still like to hear from you.

Unless all the money-counting is responsible for sprained or broken fingers, please call back. This hasn't started happening just yet, but I remember a time when it damn near took a court order to get a call back.

Due to the policy of overbooking sites, this site is overbooked. Please, be honest about your inventory. You won't hurt our feelings if you don't have what we ask for, in spite of how we may sound over the phone. Inventory management is still a constant burr in our saddles when it doesn't have to be.

Don't set unrealistic goals for your sales staff. Publishers, a lesson you have learned too well is the Humian notion of the Uniformity of Nature; that is, that the future should resemble the past. What they have not learned at all (and this is not unique to the media world) is Hume's conclusion, which is that believing the future will resemble the past is an infinitely regressive induction. Our reason for thinking that the future will resemble the past is that the future resembled the past in the past. That seems patently circular: the belief that p is said to be justified by the belief that p. Guess what? Sometimes, ad spending in a category or marketplace does NOT increase by nearly 50 percent year-to-year.

I appreciate that the project of selling is to get as much money as possible for giving up as little product as possible; and that buying is a process of trying to get as much product as possible while giving up as little money as possible. But give your sales force a break and try to be reasonable with what you expect from them. Unless, of course, you are looking for a way to cheat them out of commissions...

If anyone out there is already encountering some of the problems above, feel free to share your stories!