Dennis Publishing

The ramblings of a London publisher www.dennis.co.uk I @DPLUK I @DennisCareers I www.linkedin.com/company/dennis-publishing

[dennispublishing]

The Big Issue Sales Challenge

The Big Issue Sales Challenge was by far the most hands-on session in this year’s GENIUS Week. Ten members of the Dennis ad sales team took to Oxford Street to sell that week’s issue of TBI. Some TBI vendors helped them by giving them insight and advice. “Bryan was really friendly and gave us insight on the different types of people he encounters and the multitude of ways someone can tell you no,” said Jessica Quinney, one of Dennis’s new graduate interns, about her vender.

Even for trained salespeople, selling The Big Issue was difficult. “It was much tougher than selling ad space,” according to Karl Taylor. There was a general consensus among the competitors that the challenge was much more difficult than they had originally anticipated. “I was not prepared for how the general public would react to someone trying to talk to them,” said Tim Deeks. He was shocked at how people reacted to him.

Jessica had a similar experience, amazed at the lengths people would go to in order to avoid her. She has learned a lot from this experience, and intends to change her ways. “Being able to experience it from the seller’s point of view has changed how I’m going to react to street sellers from now on,” she said.

Kim Stone was the overall winner, selling six copies in about two hours. The competitors sold, on average, about two copies each.

“I now have even more admiration for the stamina and resolve of BI vendors,” said Jenny Bryan. She came away from the challenge having sold two magazines, but feeling like she’d put in so much more effort than that.

The competitors all have an even greater respect for TBI vendors now and appreciate how difficult it is to make a living by selling magazines on the street. One of the many valuable lessons learned from the inaugural GENIUS Week.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Matt White and Simon Best’s GENIUS Week Session

GENIUS Week came to a close on Thursday, with some in-house Dennis talent hosting the last session. Simon Best and Matt White, the Advertising Director and Creative Director of Adnostic, respectively, held a short but entertaining session.

With a bit of flair typical of the Adnostic team, Simon and Matt explained the changing landscape of ads in the digital world, and how the launch of Apple News in September will affect it. By comparing Apple to the Death Star and themselves to Hans Solo and Luke Skywalker, they engaged the audience.

Apple will be able to control the news that people see within Apple News, as well as the ads that they see. Though a bit of what we know about the new Apple News is still speculation, the Adnostic team is hoping to prepare in advance for the Apple takeover.

Matt and Simon describe Adnostic as a small company, but not in a negative way. They’re more agile than bigger companies, and able to adapt more quickly. Because they are smaller than Apple, they can more easily destroy the Death Star with a tiny fighter plane.

Matt and Simon, along with the rest of Adnostic, await the release of Apple News so that they can find its weaknesses and destroy it.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

John Wilkins’s GENIUS Week Session

John Wilkins presented on creativity on the last day of GENIUS Week. Having recently been a judge at The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, John knows his way around the advertising world. He showed the group his ten favorite video ads from the festival, and spoke briefly about each one.

Great and compelling ads, in general, tell a story of some sort. The nature of advertising is changing, so that brands now create a piece of technology that does something good, and make an ad about it. Thus, the ads talk about the action, and not the brand.

Watch the videos below to get a feel for what John is talking about.

Number 10

Number 9

Number 8

Number 7

Number 6

Number 5

Number 4

Number 3

Number 2

Number 1

[dennispublishing]

Andy Power’s GENIUS Week Session

Barter is the oldest currency in the world, and Andy Power spoke with the Dennis team today about how it is still in use today and beneficial to sales teams.

Andy works at Miroma, a company started only 12 years ago but already gaining a reputation as one of the fastest growing barter companies. One of Miroma’s partnerships is with Mediacom, who have also been really involved with GENIUS Week.

Andy explained two separate types of barter trading models currently in use. Part contra is the model wherein companies use products or services to partly pay for advertising before a media campaign. The other trading model, an ROI, involves a commitment from the barter company to buy back the product or service after the media campaign.

The session was more of a discussion than a lecture, as the sales team had quite a few questions for Andy. The idea of barter in the publishing industry is a really exciting one, and the Dennis team was very interested in what Andy had to say.

Andy encourages everyone to be open to new ideas and new things, especially in business.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Melanie Gividen’s GENIUS Week Session

Melanie Gividen, who formerly worked at Dennis, started off her talk with a bit about what she does at Top Right as the Performance Director.

During her talk Melanie covered four key points and split up her talk into corresponding sections:

Expert status

Connecting on social media

Insight-led questions

Sell to value

She explained what it meant to be an expert in your field of work and how to set goals to attain it. She then asked everybody to write down two things that make them an expert in their field, and what they can do to become more expert. The group then presented each of their ideas and received feedback.

Melanie then discussed the new digital era and how necessary it is to keep up with your clients on social media sites. Technology is changing and so should the way people sell. She stressed that teams need to have insight-led questions, as opposed to unnecessary or uninteresting questions, to keep the client engaged.

The attendees were asked to pick a client and write down a few insight-led questions to ask. Again, they shared their responses with the group and discussed them.

The session ended with Melanie explaining the concept of selling your value by demonstrating to your client how valuable your solution is.

Written by Marcus Campbell

[dennispublishing]

Chris Lewis-Jones’s GENIUS Week Session

Chris Lewis-Jones is the Strategic Partnerships Director at OMD, and has worked in the sales business for many years. He spoke to the Dennis team about how they could make their content more exciting and accessible.

To illustrate his talk Chris used a recent Domino’s campaign as an example that allowed people to order pizza on Twitter just by tweeting the pizza emoji. This campaign is a perfect case of how a campaign has to deliver a simple experience for the consumer, no matter how complicated the tech is. The more complicated the process, the less it will interest a consumer.

Content is also key, as it has to be memorable. It seems a simple enough idea, but one that often gets lost. Consumers need to remember your ad and your brand, and you need to become a brand that people care about.

Chris shared a brainstorming strategy with the team as well, saying that whenever they have an idea they should write it down. Then, go back to the idea and give it a name. Explain it in a couple of sentences, draw it out, discuss the insight behind it, and explain how it will work. This strategy transforms one-dimensional ideas into three-dimensional ideas, because it forces you to think more deeply about the concept.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Catherine Pronzato’s GENIUS Week Session

Catherine Pronzato is the head of Connect, an offshoot of Mediacom. She took the Dennis team through how her company approaches planning and what makes them different from other agencies.

Most important, she said, is the connection between all the different media platforms. Putting campaign ideas into an excel spreadsheet is no longer a viable option because it gives the wrong mindset to teams, and suggests a disconnect between the platforms.

After a plan has been implemented, the different platforms become even more connected, as Mediacom is able to judge what impact each channel is having on the others. The plan can then be adjusted based on the effectiveness of each variable if necessary. The team is also able to estimate what the impact of taking one channel out of the web would be.

Catherine ended her session with a few quick tips about dealing with agencies. She advised the sales team not to overcomplicate things, and to include measurement in all of their responses.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Rob Ellis’s GENIUS Week Session

Rob Ellis is the MD of COG Research, and one of the speakers for GENIUS Week.

In preparation for Rob’s GENIUS session, attendees were asked to fill out a short survey regarding brand perceptions of various technology brands, including Apple, Samsung and Sony.

Rob used the results of the survey to demonstrate the difference between explicit and implicit testing.:

Explicit testing is simply someone’s answer to the given question.

Implicit testing is how long it takes them to answer.

In an ideal scenario, you would want a consumer to answer both positively and quickly, but that is not always the case. The least desirable scenario is answering negatively quite quickly. Answering positively but taking a bit of time to answer is better than answering negatively but taking a longer time to answer. Rob works with companies to help them achieve a positive answer.

Part of the mission at COG is to understand people and their mental activities better. The three most important mental faculties for advertising are: memory, because people don’t consciously remember all the ads they see; processing, in particular conscious and unconscious processing; and cognition, or how people think about ads.

Combining the knowledge of these faculties, as well as insight gained from implicit testing, allows advertisers to better understand how their ads are working, and what they can improve.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Ivor Falvey’s GENIUS Week Session

Ivor Falvey from the Lighthouse Company talked to some of the Dennis team this morning about releasing their inner genius.

Ivor started by discussing some of the changing trends in the business world over the past decade. These changes included consumers wanting everything now, and the added digital and social exposure in business. He went on to look at how most people will change careers around three times in their lifetimes, which is vastly different to when a job was for life.

Ivor talked about developing your own personal brand, so that you stand out from the crowd. Being memorable is all about being authentic, and also having a ‘quirk,’ or defining feature that makes people remember you. He joked that you shouldn’t be too quirky though or you might be remembered for all the wrong reasons!

[dennispublishing]

Scott Keyser’s GENIUS Week Session

Scott Keyser spoke with the Dennis team on Tuesday afternoon about the importance of building positive relationships with clients. Scott called building these relationships “market-making,” and discussed seven steps that go along with this concept. These included identifying the individual buyers that you want to do business with, and getting them to know, like and trust you.

Scott then had the attendees break off into groups to brainstorm ideas for getting potential clients to know, like and trust them.

The brainstorming session lasted for about twenty minutes, with each group discussing conventional ways of interacting with clients, then more unconventional and unique ideas.

Each group ranked its unique ideas as a grid based on how easy or difficult they would be to implement, and how much impact they would have. They then shared their best idea, and received feedback from the rest of the attendees on what they had put forward.

The key take away from Scott’s session was the importance of personalization. Showing that you took the time to get to know someone by simply writing them a hand-written note of thanks, shows a potential client that you are truly interested in them as a person, and not just a business deal.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Jonathan Palmer’s GENIUS Week Session

Jonathan Palmer began his GENIUS session yesterday afternoon by asking how many people in the room used social media. Everyone raised his or her hand. If he’d asked that question ten years ago, the response would have been quite different. According to Jonathan, the way that people use the Internet has fundamentally changed over the last few years, largely due to smart phones.

When we talk about social media, we’re talking about a very broad category; it’s all the platforms that connect to the online community. Gaining insight into each medium is key, and helps advertisers know which types of ads to use for each platform.

Jonathan went through detailed descriptions of each social media platform, outlining the demographics present in each medium. For instance, Snapchat has a much younger demographic than Facebook. He stressed the idea that the way you advertise should change based on the medium that you’re attempting to advertise in. It’s also important to understand when people are seeing your content, and how they will react based on the time of year, or even the time of day.

He encouraged the sales team to create content that they would want to share, and highlighted that consumer experience is the priority. Jonathan concluded his session by reminding the sales team that all content is social content, because all content can be shared across some sort of social media.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

An Interview With… Inaugural GENIUS Week session

GENIUS week got off to a rousing start bright and early this morning with ‘An Interview With,’ led by Julian Lloyd-Evans. The four speakers being interviewed were Richard Downey, Jonathan Asfaw, Mandy Critchley, and Duncan Tickell. All have worked at Dennis in the past, and returned to share their insights with the Dennis sales team. The questions focused mostly on training: both the training that the speakers received at Dennis, and how they train their current employees.

Julian asked the speakers to give an overview of their first few days at Dennis. Duncan remembered the Dennis Quiz from his first day, during which he learned about the company and Felix Dennis himself.

Mandy and Jonathan each joined the team with other people, and recalled that they had great training when they first started. Mandy said that being able to undergo training with other people helped; she knew that they were in the same boat as her.

The general consensus among the speakers was that Dennis training really resonated with them. Dennis does more training than most other companies that they have worked with, and it’s something that the people at Dennis really value. Duncan cited the “development culture” present at Dennis. Managers aren’t afraid to give people responsibility relatively early on. Many employees rise through the ranks quickly because they are given opportunities to grow. Though training at some other companies makes employees think that they can sit back and allow those higher-up to take care of anything, Dennis employees don’t have that attitude.

It was generally agreed that the most important thing that the speakers look for in prospective employees is attitude. Employees have to have a willingness to learn new things and adapt themselves to their environment. Everything else can be learnt, but you can’t teach attitude.

Each speaker shared the best pieces of advice they had ever received:

• Mandy was told early on by Paul Debenham that everyone is always still learning within the business. • John’s advice was to be courageous enough to hire people better than you. • Richard said that giving people room to develop isn’t always the easiest choice for a manager, but if you don’t give your employees that chance then they will leave. • Duncan advised the sales team to be open to honest feedback and not to be defensive about it.

It was a great session to kick off what is looking to be a great week, filled with insights from some of the industry’s best.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Dan Wood’s GENIUS Week Session

Dan Wood, Head of Partnerships at Mediacom, spoke today about how they work with clients to create content that really comes alive and makes consumers want to interact with it. 

Content now needs to work much harder to get the attention of consumers. Dan defined quality content as communications that the consumer chooses to engage with. He went on to say that advertising now has many new digital opportunities, and with that comes the idea that advertising is now about engagement instead of just exposure and interruption. 

Consumers are time poor, and much more savvy than they used to be, so they are now actively rejecting standard advertising. Traditional advertising isn’t having the impact that it once had, so it’s up to the advertiser and consulting companies to give audiences content that they want to interact with. 

Dan concluded the session with his top tips, which included consistently communicating with the consulting company, and making sure you’re an expert on your own audience. 

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

An Interview with Carl Richards

Carl Richards has been working with the sales team at Dennis for three years, and training salespeople for almost eleven. Despite having been instructing people for a decade, Carl still finds it rewarding. “I think when you do something that you love, it never feels like it’s taking up too much of your time.”

But before he trained, he sold, which is what makes him so good at his job. Having worked as a salesman and sales manager for twenty years, Carl started to become more involved in the training aspect of things. He then graduated to a different type of selling. “Training is still selling. You’re selling to people in the room. You’re selling a concept to them. You’re selling a way of doing something,” he said. Not only can Carl call on his past experiences to help his pitches during training, but also to make him more relatable to his clients, like the Dennis sales team. “I’ve got the war stories, so if people ask me a question, invariably and inevitably I’ve been there so I can give reasonably sage advice.” Carl talks not just about hypothetical situations, but situations that he has actually experienced in his substantial time as a salesman.

Carl works with nearly all members of the Dennis sales team, from salespeople to managers, striving to improve how the Dennis staff sells. Much of Carl’s work with the Dennis team involves attitude. He looks at the attitudes and approaches of the salespeople towards sales and attempts to better them. He believes that sales training should be ongoing, and compares it to the world of sports. He cites the fact that runners spend the vast majority of their time practicing, and only about three to five percent of their time actually competing. “If we’re going to be good at anything, any human endeavor, we need to train and practice as much as we possibly can.” Carl carries this philosophy into his GENIUS week session.

Carl’s session is called “Sell the Unsellable,” where he will be asking the attendees to look at something that, at first glance, is unsellable, and find a way to sell it. Though Dennis publishes many market-leading titles, Carl doesn’t take that as an excuse to become lax in sales methods. He thinks that practicing selling the unsellable will give the Dennis team an edge over its competitors. “We still need to work that little bit harder,” he says. “Sell the Unsellable” will take place on Wednesday, 15 July at 8:45 at Newman Street Tavern.

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

The London Graduate Programme

Dennis Publishing has been participating in the London Graduate Programme since 2011. Leti Taylor, resourcing manager at Dennis, explains how the Programme works and why it makes Dennis unique.

Interns are taken on on an individual basis all over Dennis throughout the year, but the London Grad Programme is different in that it’s specialized for advertising, and has ten to twelve interns each year. “The advertising programme is the only official internship programme that we have” Leti says. New recruits are found at the UCL graduate fair, with both the Dennis Recruitment team and Dennis staff that been through the programme, going along and talking to students and giving them all the information. Leti says that it’s very encouraging for the graduates to speak to the salespeople who participated in the programme and have gone on to be employed full-time by Dennis.

Once back from the fair the recruitment process is as follows:

• A phone interview with Leti • A group interview • Two stages of individual interviews o One with the advertising team o A role playing interview

The whole recruitment process takes about two weeks, and the following Monday there are eleven bright new faces wandering around Dennis, getting to know the building and the great people that work in it.

In comparison to interns that start at Dennis by themselves, the advertising interns tend to do better. “Within media sales we’ve got a 95% success rate and that comes down to how they all start together.” Leti noted that the advertising interns thrive off of the fact that they’re not the only new person are able to make friends. They can then encourage one another throughout their internships, as well as foster a bit of healthy competition.

The grads take on positions across the sales floor, including some more technical roles, like client services, ad ops, and research and insight. Though this year’s grads have only started this past week, staff members are already confident in their abilities. “Most of our stars from the sales floor have come from the programme, which is why we keep doing it every year. We get really great grads, give them great opportunities and a lot of them stay for three or four years,” says Leti. They’ve come to Dennis at a promising time with GENIUS week just around the corner.

That Dennis finds sales training important is obvious from both the GENIUS week initiative and the specific training that the grads receive during their internship. “We have an external trainer that gives them three days of really intense training on everything to do with media, sales and advertising,” says Leti. The trainer then comes back halfway through the internship to give the grads a refresher course on everything they learned, as well as more in-depth skills that they will be able to utilize.

Dennis training is a year-round initiative. In addition to external trainers, there are senior management training sessions. A senior manager may hold a session on something like negotiation, and anyone who feels that they would benefit from that session is invited to join. Leti sums up sales training at Dennis in one phrase: “It’s always available.”

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Ben Salmon’s GENIUS Week Session

Ben Salmon, the founder of Attributely, talked with the Dennis team today about context, and how context plays into what types of advertising are appropriate for each consumer. 

Ben had a couple of different definitions of context, including the reason for the consumer’s interaction, the channel and time of day, and whether the consumer is an existing customer or a prospect. 

Session attendees were also advised to think about what ads would be appropriate for which consumers, based on the context. If a consumer is visiting the website to make a complaint, it may be inappropriate to show an ad asking them to renew their subscription. If they’re accessing the website from a mobile device, a video ad would be less appropriate than a static one. 

Giving examples from a Volkswagen campaign that he recently worked on, Ben showed how analysing data of why people visit the site, and changing the site to fit those reasons, can make the site more accessible as a whole.

The session concluded with Ben encouraging the Dennis team to not do stupid things. Sound advice to those not just in ad sales, but other roles too. 

Written by Katherine Christian

[dennispublishing]

Life after Felix: Why Dennis Publishing is branching into charity with the Heart of England Forest