Business Insider’s Jana Meron on getting salespeople to love programmatic

The machines are not going to take over. That’s the message from Jana Meron, vp of programmatic and data strategy at Business Insider, who spoke at the Digiday Programmatic Media Summit last month. As publishers completely embrace programmatic, Meron talked about some important shifts an organization and team will have to make to let programmatic advertising change their world, as she shows with Business Insider’s example.

Below are the highlights, edited for clarity.

Incentivize everyone to be on board with programmatic
“How are going to align our incentives? Let’s make sure every single person is on board and participates. The best way to do that is to make sure you’re doing it with their wallets. We’re going to pay editors for driving pageviews that drive incremental revenue. We’re going to teach our sales force to not be afraid. When salespeople get paid for PMPs, they’re really psyched about it.”

Educate everyone about what this change really means
“How could we empower the sales force through education so that they could talk to customers and be comfortable because they are selling the right things? It’s not just our training, but also our customers. It’s all about knowledge-sharing. Everybody was afraid of the big, bad programmatic change. We educated internally and externally. Not just sales, but operations and newsroom teams.”

There doesn’t have to be a conflict in sales teams
“The idea of channel conflict of salespeople isn’t really a thing. Our buyers know who to call. We can also bring it full circle. We can connect direct advertising to programmatic advertising. We’re talking about optimization of processes, information-sharing and sales team. We created programmatic sellers and account managers. This was a shift for us. Programmatic is a product we sell, and it requires some expertise.”

Programmatic moves the conversation forward
“Now, we’re having a dialogue about how we can create content that will be interesting and a good user experience, but will also generate quality PMP for our vast number of advertisers.”

Check out other Digiday Live episodes. Our most recent speakers have included Turner’s David Levy, The New York Times’ Francesca Donner and Essence’s Christian Juhl. Subscribe to our podcast and get a notification for every new episode. We are on  iTunes | Stitcher | RSS.