The resources on these pages support media, sales and marketing teams selling digital media. Whether it’s the Digital Media Sales Academy programmes or online media sales strategy development, ask your Academy Manager or Project Manager if you need more information.
This online learning resource is where you can discuss the issues from your Academy and download the outputs of our workshops.
Your Academy Director and lead tutor is Danny Meadows-Klue: Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com
Welcome to your Digital Training Academy: a great way to boost your knowledge and skills, helping you and your team get the most from digital marketing, publishing and communications.
All of us here at Digital hope you'll enjoy your Digital Training Academy, but we also hope you'll instantly be able to achieve more in your firm.
Find out how Digital Training Academy works
Here is the place you can discuss issues with your tutor and other Academy participants
Is there something you did not understand on the Academy? Is there a new point you would like to make? Are there any new issues that you have discovered now you are applying your knowledge? Use this space to make your comments and to ask your questions.
Try to include the title of the Academy Lesson that your question relates to (if there is one). The classroom is open for one month following your Academy and materials will stay here as a reference point for you for a further year.
After your Digital Media Sales Academy
When our intensive Academy day is over, your learning should continue. In this section we give you a few tips you can follow to ensure you get the most from your Digital Training Academy
Please see the comments below
Whatever your involvement is in internet marketing, it’s useful to have a few great facts at your fingertips, so here are a few we put together based on the UK online media industry. Read through them and share them with colleagues. If you are taking part in a Digital Training Academy then we might have a few more for you as well. Read through them and think about additional cool facts that reflect the growth of internet media or marketing in your sector.
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In this space we're listing things from the Academy that we feel 'Rock' in online advertising, and things that, if we're honest, 'Flop'. By helping our clients harness the rocks and steer away from the flops they'll produce more powerful communication and enjoy even better results. Remember, it's still a new media for many people and this can help marketers make smarter decisions...
The digital networked society is a great leveller. The relationship between brands and consumers has shifted. The structure of communications has undergone this massive leap. While the smart thinking in marketing is leaping to embrace a whole new way of doing things, much of the practice in marketing still clings to the past. That's why it wasn't just gutsy, but a strategically brilliant move for Microsoft to use a television style commercial to make the point for them.
Watch the Bring Back The Love film
In this lesson we explore the growth of online advertising spend in the UK. As the world's fastest adopting internet advertising economy, the experiences here can be used to anticipate the next steps in other countries. Discover how the growth of search engines have swelled to account for half of all advertising, and why online is set to become the biggest advertising media channel by 2010.
Continue reading "Digital Lesson: Online adspend leaps (with audio commentary)" »
In this lesson we explore the growth of online advertising spend in the UK. As the world's fastest adopting internet advertising economy, the experiences here can be used to anticipate the next steps in other countries. Discover how the growth of search engines have swelled to account for half of all advertising, and why online is set to become the biggest advertising media channel by 2010.
Continue reading "Digital Lesson: Online adspend leaps" »
Here are ten simple takeouts from the Digital Media Sales Academy training programme. They are ideas that can help boost online advertising sales. Some focus on the process, others on the product, and others on the team. These notes accompany the talks from Danny Meadows-Klue and are part of the 5 day Digital Media Sales Academy training programme for portals, magazines, newspapers and online entertainment businesses.
Download the lecture notes, click through the slides, and share your opinions here in the online classroom.
Continue reading "Digital Lesson: 10 key ideas for boosting online sales" »
What are the developments and trends within the online advertising sector over the next eighteen months? Massive growth continues, market share leaps over other media, video formats come of age, the results of the acquisition frenzy make the industry mature, media planning and buying becomes much more complex and the supply explodes thanks to social media. Drawn from an edition of the Digital Publishing Strategy Academy designed for online newspapers, this handout is one of 30 supporting our executive coaching for online media groups.
Download the lecture notes, click through the slides, and share your opinions here in the online classroom.
A lesson from the Digital Creative Academy about why online advertising delivers impact
We live in a media saturated world. Audiences have become experienced in advertising. Many media are at risk of being screened out; television commercials not seen when they are fast forwarded, sections of newspapers going unread… Yet on the web the advertising is delivered the very moment the viewer requests the next page of content. Rather than an ‘opportunity to see’ that’s a guaranteed view. This means the impact of online advertising can be that much greater.
Download A lesson from the Digital Creative Academy
Craig Newmark set up his list of local web listings in San Francisco in 1995. Run from the his garage on shoestring budgets, CraigsList is the story of a dotcom success that has spawned offshoots in 175 cities across 35 countries, and audience traffic that matches Amazon. It's left regional newspaper executives reeling, and forced many analysts to question the future of local press.
Go to the page where you can download the article
We set up the Digital Media Sales Academy courses in 2004 and since then they’ve been taught to teams in 20 countries. Trainers have been supporting media sales managers and their teams through online tuition. Here we’ve taken a selection of comments from the conversations in the Digital Classroom to provide teams with additional insights. Any Academy participant can post questions and tutors guarantee to reply. These clips from the classroom highlight just a few of the issues raised, and how working more smartly can help boost the productivity of your team.
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The sudden arrival of in-stream video advertising formats presents new challenges for commercial directors, ad operations teams and media planners. Minor variations in the way video advertising messages are delivered can have a disproportionate impact on the effectiveness of the commercials and the quality of the campaign. These best practice tips for video advertising reflect techniques that have proven to be effective for both media planners and online publishers in getting more value from the media space and creative assets.
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If you’re McDonalds and selling breakfast products, when do you want to advertise? If you’re a coffee chain with an afternoon coffee shop promotion then when could trigger the purchase? If you’re a film company releasing a new blockbuster, when are people most receptive? Broadcast media has always been strong in using the times of day to talk to customers when they are most receptive, but why have web marketers missed the trick? And how can media owners and planners reap the rewards to improve the effectiveness of how they work?
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Getting to grips with how online advertising works, and the scale of benefit expected from a campaign can be a real challenge to those new to the web. That’s why we developed a simple way of describing the steps in the online advertising sales conversion process. Here you can read through the thinking and download some of the simple notes that are used in the Digital Media Planning Academy to introduce marketers new to digital channels to the models and concepts at the heart of successful online advertising.
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Selling online advertising is harder than selling print. While the Google interface may have made search listings easy enough for anyone to buy off the screen, selling brand building graphical ‘display’ space is tough because it opens up so many questions, often at a time when there just isn’t the knowledge inside the client team or the sales force.
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The world’s largest online ad market is still enjoying the largest annual growth in real terms. Spend surged ahead by 25.4%, crossing the $5bn mark in a single quarter. Boosted in particular by massive increases in the supply of media from social networks, and the continued switch of acquisition budgets into search, the wider media sector is hurting as budgets are displaced and advertisers follow their audiences. The big changes are now starting.
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When it comes to planning the set up and structure for a digital media business the economies of scale are different to those in classic media. In magazines and newspapers, centralising the buying of paper or the operations of accounts and HR functions is the norm, and the bulk of decision making and innovation moved to the editors and publishers of individual titles. However the economics work differently in digital media and there is a much broader economy of scale that means groups benefit from not only centralising the ‘plumbing’ (bandwidth, servers and IT management), but also in standardising the systems and platforms (content tools, analytics packages, advertising servers). This leaves the publishing and editorial teams free to be creative within the content, but without having to build and constantly refine the structures and templates around the business.
Continue reading "Post-academy exercise: Organisational structures for digital media vs classic media" »
8th - 9th April 2008 | Paris
Getting online news media to earn real revenues is a tougher challenge than many newspaper directors expect. Web advertising spend may now be larger than newspaper advertising in many countries, but that doesn’t mean newspapers can expect a big share. The search engines, portals and sales networks continue to dominate the sector, and as the next wave of revenue pours into social media like Facebook, newspaper sites need to fight to earn their share.
Continue reading "Digital Publishing Strategy Academy: Integrating online advertising into web editorial - models and strategies" »
“The Internet is brilliant – you can measure everything”. How many times did you hear this phrase in the early days of digital marketing? A few years on, does the promise measure up to reality, or does this sound more familiar: “we’re drowning in numbers, but lacking in meaningful analysis” and “we’ve got half a dozen different versions of the truth”?
Continue reading "19th March 2008: The Devil’s In the Detail... (And the detail is the data)" »
Designed for internet advertising sales teams with less than a couple of years experience, this acceleration course is boosts knowledge of formats, trading models and key trends in impacting
on price and client expectations. We examine deal structures, metrics, campaign reporting and how you can segment the market, as well as practical exercises to respond to client briefs.
Click here to see all public access courses
Stockholm, Sweden
The training programme will be an additional strand to the annual TS conference in one of the most advanced digital markets in the world. This Digital Training Academy will look at some of the global trends in online advertising as well as the craft skills for helping media owners boost their revenues in online advertising.
Olympia, London
Social media has changed the rules of publishing. These days any publisher who isn't connecting their readers together is missing out on the biggest driver of traffic and revenue. Involving the audience in the content of a site may still feel like a big leap, but as the web has grown up, the models of publishing have too. In this session Digital's team explore the principles behind effective social networking and ask why most publishers get it wrong. They provide plain spoken commentary about what magazines large and small need to be doing, and look at simple steps for getting started. Senior Associate Consultant Tom Bureau leads this session for us. As the former UK Managing Director of multi award winning CNET Networks, Tom built their range of online magazines, portals and networks based on the power of social networking. As part of this Digital Training Academy, Tom will be taking general questions about social media and Digital's Team will be feeding these into a live online classroom for event participants.
Submit your questions at http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/
Materials: Materials are restricted to participants | Bookings: To apply for a place contact the conference organizers
Strengthening your team with the knowledge about how the online markets work is key to unlocking pent-up potential. Even a great sales person can be lost in the maze of metrics, daunted by the jargon and unclear about whether the products being pitched will meet client objectives. Get the knowledge to the right level and not only does each person’s productivity increase, but the whole crew comes together to deliver better results. This practical one day course will cover the basics, answer those unanswered questions and help your team pull together to sell online media effectively.
This advanced level Digital Media Sales Academy tackles the challenges of explaining online's impact in Central Europe. Getting media sales teams up to speed with online advertising sales is critical if a media group is going to unlock the potential revenues out there. This new international edition of our most popular Academy combines theory and practical workshops to build pitches, examine the sales points and boost the way online is marketed. We explore the power of rich media, sponsorships, home page takeovers, video advertising and integrated digital marketing, and the range of creative solutions already in place to make online marketing even more effective.
Book meetings with our trainers in Poland | Materials: Materials are restricted to participants | Bookings: email Digital's team
Getting media sales teams up to speed with online advertising sales is critical if a media group is going to unlock the potential revenues out there. This new international edition of our most popular Academy combines theory and practical workshops to build pitches, examine the sales points and boost the way online is marketed. Over several days we explore the power of video advertising on the web and the range of creative solutions already in place to make online marketing even more effective.
This advanced level Digital Media Sales Academy tackles the challenges of explaining online's impact in Central America. Getting media sales teams up to speed with online advertising sales is critical if a media group is going to unlock the potential revenues out there. This new international edition of our most popular Academy combines theory and practical workshops to build pitches, examine the sales points and boost the way online is marketed. We explore the power of rich media, sponsorships, home page takeovers, video advertising and integrated digital marketing, and the range of creative solutions already in place to make online marketing even more effective.
Strengthening your team with the knowledge about how the online markets work is key to unlocking pent-up potential. Even a great sales person can be lost in the maze of metrics, daunted by the jargon and unclear about whether the products being pitched will meet client objectives. Get the knowledge to the right level and not only does each person’s productivity increase, but the whole crew comes together to deliver better results. This practical one day course will cover the basics, answer those unanswered questions and help your team pull together to sell online media effectively.
Strengthening your team with the knowledge about how the online markets work is key to unlocking pent-up potential. Even a great sales person can be lost in the maze of metrics, daunted by the jargon and unclear about whether the products being pitched will meet client objectives. Get the knowledge to the right level and not only does each person’s productivity increase, but the whole crew comes together to deliver better results. This practical one day course will cover the basics, answer those unanswered questions and help your team pull together to sell online media effectively.
Strengthening your team with the knowledge about how the online markets work is key to unlocking pent-up potential. Even a great sales person can be lost in the maze of metrics, daunted by the jargon and unclear about whether the products being pitched will meet client objectives. Get the knowledge to the right level and not only does each person’s productivity increase, but the whole crew comes together to deliver better results. This practical one day course will cover the basics, answer those unanswered questions and help your team pull together to sell online media effectively.
Strengthening your team with the knowledge about how the online markets work is key to unlocking pent-up potential. Even a great sales person can be lost in the maze of metrics, daunted by the jargon and unclear about whether the products being pitched will meet client objectives. Get the knowledge to the right level and not only does each person’s productivity increase, but the whole crew comes together to deliver better results. This practical one day course will cover the basics, answer those unanswered questions and help your team pull together to sell online media effectively.
Strengthening your team with the knowledge about how the online markets work is key to unlocking pent-up potential. Even a great sales person can be lost in the maze of metrics, daunted by the jargon and unclear about whether the products being pitched will meet client objectives. Get the knowledge to the right level and not only does each person’s productivity increase, but the whole crew comes together to deliver better results. This practical one day course will cover the basics, answer those unanswered questions and help your team pull together to sell online media effectively.
The growth of internet access has greater implications than just an additional channel in the communications mix. As people explore the new platforms, they reappraise their use of the old ones, and as audiences swell the market becomes large enough to attract investment in content, entertainment and commerce. This virtuous circle has been fuelling the Digital Networked Society (DNS) and from this research snapshot for the UK market at the end of 2007, it’s clear that Europe’s leading digital economy has entered a new phase is the dynamics of use.
Download the UK market report
Ahead of all our Digital Training Academies we're keen to get you thinking about the issues and getting up to speed on the research and the state of the industry. That's why we've sent out two of our Digital insight reports that you can read through before the Academy begins. The first explores the tools and techniques that are delivering results across a wide range of digital marketing formats.The second explores online advertising spend and its growth in the countries accross Europe. They should be a simple and fast read, but they each make points that we'll be touching on in the Digital Media Sales Academy. If you have any questions, then post them here...
Download_Digital_Marketing_Innovations_Report
Download_Digital_Europe_Report
Last year, Microsoft began investigating user generated content and the implications in how advertising will work in social networks. This latest qualitative study covers the US, UK, Canada, China, Brazil and France with an objective of understanding how receptive consumers were to advertising in these markets.
Download the Report
Internet communications have become a routine part of the daily lives of most people in the technically advanced countries of Asia, Western Europe and North America. As part of this, online marketing has already become a mainstream part of the media mix. These facts and landmarks we collated for participants on the Digital Training Academies are a summary of the internet and marketing development Academy lectures and are intended to present a few highlights of the immense changes created through this industry.
Download the Report
This study compares media contributions from different channels in the drive to purchase. Marketers have become increasingly aware of the implications of a changing media landscape.
Download_the_Report
What form of advertising works best? That’s a question you’re always asked in the digital marketing industry, and every genre of websites have their own research to help you with the answer. But new insights from the OPA in the US are firming up exactly how much more impact video gives to campaigns, and why placing them inside content-rich destination sites adds further value still.
Download the research from the OPA
Great to see the next wave of online ad effectiveness research for Video formats come through. Conclusion? Video works. And it works better than Rich Media, which works better than the in banner flash formats, that works better than the original static formats. Startling? Not at all. But the media community needs the proof points to give the confidence that these ‘truths of media’ work on the web just as they do in classic media. Check out NetImperative for more.
Jargon
Let's get jargon busting!
www.DigitalJargonBuster.org
Great online creative
Check out the creative showcase Danny helped set up in the UK
www.CreativeShowcase.net
Counting and analytics
Learn more about how to count and what counts
http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/analytics
Several people emailed to ask, so here it is... We created this Academy three years ago to help media sales teams sell online advertising as effectively as they'd sold print, radio and television space before. The Academy centres around a packed day of lessons, but it also includes research we're giving you before, and time online afterwards to answer your questions. This website on DigitalTrainingAcademy.com is the place where we'll be hosting your questions and tutoring notes.
Publishers told us they needed to raise their ad revenues online. Just think about your business: maybe that's 500k this year, maybe it's double last year's budgets, but you'll be facing a pretty steep goal if you're like most of the firms we work with.
Your teams are probably less familiar with online than print and suddenly it's at the heart of their work rather than a value-add that was bundled to close something in the next print edition. They're selling against some of the most powerful and structured teams in the world, and your market share is probably falling even if your revenues are growing substantially …in fact at the hands of search engines it could be collapsing. Worse than that, the other guys are raising the bar all the time. The migration of classified ads out of print is hurting.
Suddenly sales teams have to get up to speed with the new tools and use them in an intensely competitive market. Their clients may know much more than they do, and certainly some of the digital agencies will have mastered the jargon and the principles. The ad formats, the targeting, the metrics and reporting; it's a world beyond print or broadcast. And that's before you think about the daunting jargon and the impenetrable web of companies in the industry, that's a scary place for a sales person to be.
The Digital Media Sales Academy focuses on giving you the right knowledge to build your understanding and shift your confidence. It's a full day training Academy preceded by pre-course reading and followed by access to a bespoke learning centre for the group. We've even set up a graduate programme that lets us continue supporting them with email news services for six months.
We're the premium training provider in the industry, training thousands of executives across fifteen countries. My passion has always been training and more than 30,000 people have attended my talks and courses. All of us at the Digital training Academy not only hope you enjoy this Academy, but that it changes the way you work. The digital landscape is rich in opportunity and I look forward to seeing you get your fair share of it.
Danny Meadows-Klue, Founder, Digital Training Academy
Knowledge and training are critical for online marketers. Get it right and the internet becomes the most powerful marketing tool there's ever been, but getting it right is not straight forward. That's why I helped set up the Internet Advertising Bureau in 1997, and why I moved on from being its Chief Executive in 2005 to set up the Digital Training Academy. Thousands of marketers need to learn these new skills, so what the Digital Training Academy does is bring together senior industry figures to help them get there. Our team has been training marketers since 2001, and now through the forty academy courses, we have great ways to get your team on the fast track.
If you'd like some more background about some of the things I've done in the internet marketing and publishing industries then there's a biography in our press centre.