A conversation with Thomas De Napoli, VP Head of Sales & Underwriting APM and MPR about how things have operated on the business side of MPR and APM during a period when national attention is being paid to Minnesota in general, and Minneapolis specifically.
What does it look like internally when a moment like this hits? How does the business side rally around the editorial team to make sure they have what they need without the revenue pressure getting in the way?
So it looks very purposeful. You’d think it looks like something out of like an Aaron Sorkin movie or it’s like walking fast and talking fast. And there’s like a kind of controlled chaos, but it’s kind of anything. We’ve been, at least within APM, preparing for this for several years right now. What we do is very anchored to a mission.
I’m a Gen Xer. I’m kind of allergic to mission statements, but in this instance it makes a lot of sense. It’s a connected America, fueled by trust and understanding. The revenue teams know that they play a really critical role in generating the financing or a big piece of financing to enable that mission. Purposeful. That’s what it looks like.
Public media is uniquely positioned to go all-in on coverage like this without worrying about advertiser blowback. Do you find that underwriters actually lean in during these moments, or does the sales team have to navigate sensitivity around the subject matter?
One of the good things about public media, when we talk about advertiser blowback, is that because – as a function of how we record – it’s very non-biased. Some people might disagree with that, but it’s very non-biased. And we really work to bring clarity and context and kind of connection around news stories. So it’s not hyper-emotional, it’s not a doom scroll type of sentiment.
We don’t have as much of an issue. Now, there might be some advertisers that don’t want to be adjacent to news programming or to journalism in a given moment, but those who are can have a really high degree of certainty, 100% certainty that if what they’re sitting next to is public media, it’s not going to be something that they have to be concerned about.
This feels like a proof point for the public media model, that the business side exists to support the journalism, not the other way around. Is that a message you’re actively bringing to market, and how do potential partners respond to it?
What we’ve been bringing to market, especially for the past year or so, in my tenure leading sales at American Public Media, has been one more of a return on investment. So we view public media as a really great business investment for advertisers because of the type of audience we deliver. They’re highly educated. They’re very loyal to the extent that individual people donate over half a billion dollars a year to public media stations across the country for member gifts like a tote bag or a mug. That’s a very engaged crowd.
Think of the last time someone gave money to free to a streaming service. We know we have that really tightly engaged audience, and they tend to be more affluent than the average consumer. So right there, there’s a great audience. So there’s a valid business reason for advertisers to be supporting public media. It’s brand safe programming. It’s premium programming. It’s prestigious. It’s well regarded. You get the best of both worlds.
In a moment like this, what we really leaned on was so that’s our playbook, right? This return on investment playbook. We didn’t quite throw that out the window, but because we have such deep relationships with our our clients, because another thing that we really lean to is more of a consultative style of selling is that when this moment arose, we were able to identify who among all of our clients are the people who are most in it for the mission, who are going to see something that we’re doing to respond to that moment.
In this instance, we created nightly call in shows on Minnesota Public Radio to discuss the issues that were happening on the ground. We had advertisers signing up within less than 12 hours of seeing the package for the first time. That’s what happens when the advertiser already has faith in the audience you’re delivering, the product you’re bringing them, the messaging that you create, the environment that they’re going to be in. They believe in your mission. So when it’s all really working, it looks like that.
It looks like a Monday morning, the newsroom calls you, talks about what they’re going to do that night, and by five in the afternoon you have ads being placed.
