Payola

Photo: Magda S | Stock.xchng

It can be a really jarring experience to skip for joy into the New Year and be stopped in your tracks by the realities on the ground. Depending on how you see them, they could either be just pebbles or boulders. That’s exactly what happened to me, when I went on my first meeting with the leader of my sales team.

They’ve been trying very hard since last year to get advertisers to sign on the dotted lines. No can-do. And then minutes of anxious whisperings later, they realise that they have to deal with the hired guns that are media buyers, some of who expect a cut from the marketing commissions they make. I sit across the table from my sales team leader and wonder, “Am I in a time warp here? Doesn’t the merit system exist in 2010?”

As a publisher of a darn good business/entrepreneurship magazine, I’m mindful of creating a publication that attracts readers, advertisers, investors, and the like to its pages because of its relevance and practicability to these people. That’s what I peddle to them: value. In return, I expect to receive value from them, too. So you can now imagine why I haven’t yet wrapped my head around this whole scenario narrated by my sales staff. It doesn’t compute in any pore, cell, DNA in my body that someone could make or break the conclusion of a business transaction based solely on my team’s adherence (or not) to an age-old payola system.

I’m still trying to understand.

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