What A Commercial Manager ought to know in Radio

– By Dr. Rajat Bhargava, DDG(F),AIR

(These are not in sequence and are suggestive in nature)

·        Need for a Traffic Policy and finding ways and means to have a traffic order

·        Keeping the age profile of the listner in perspective and arranging the FPC as per timeline

·        Having a commercial timeclock hourly and providing  commercial breaks at odd intervals

·        Billing & Collecting procedure and Streamlining items

·        Checking Unit Rates  specially with bonousing

·        Identifying  good agents and finding ways to reward them

·        Community Ascertainment of commercials

·        Converting Veteran Salespeople To New Digital Deadlines.Need for training the advertisers to suit                your environment

·        Getting Timely Agency Payments?

·        Handling Internet Orders / Revenues

·        How Do You Handle Extra Innings of reaching out to the clients and running your office

·        Internet Ad Invoicing – How Much Detail To Show

·        Less Is More – From Commercial Perspective-How to make it happen

·        Revisiting Bonus Incentives –Do we have any such procedure –identify it

·         Have a through knowledge of the Trade & Barter Policies of Prasar Bharati

·        Weekly Billing –Do we need in AIR?

·        Community Ascertainment Form or ARU figures

·        Gross/Net Conversion Tables

·         Understand Log Discrepancy Forms  esp in the new scenario when hard disc based digitalized                systems  are being  supplied

·        Identifying training needs

·        Working  out Advertisers Commission

·        New – Bonus Spots

·        Consolidating Traffic Departments

·         You should know that Discounting Costs You Money

·         Find out Discrepancies, Missed Spots & Log Reconciliation

·        Do You Want to be a commercial ’Manager’ Or a ‘ Print Button’?

·        To have own Resume and organization Resume local & National

·        Rules

·        To work with financial discipline

·        To know Invoicing procedures

·        How to retain Top advertisers

·        Service Charges and how to calculate it

·        Needs Analysis for Local commercial broadcasts

·        When Should a commercial manager Contact the Client?

·        Work At Home-for commercial manager- How to regulate output

·        Hardware requirements and questions related to use of these and to collate and send them to                engineering section and SD’s

• To know the difference between cost and the the real cost

·        Comments and other advice from our various contributors.

·        To assess the Radio Software Satisfaction Survey Comparatives or Audience research figures

·        Analysis of- Data Being Accumulated

·        Bonus Spots and  know the need to distribute them

·        Dynamic Vs. Advanced Scheduling

·        Gross Or Net Report-How to generate and report

·        Horizontal Rotation of spots 

·        To keep Spots away from Bumping

·        To keep Spots In Same Sets/Pods when the advertiser requires

And Finally to have

·        A experts list of “do’s” and don’ts”based on directives of DG AIR/CEO

o the “do’s”

o the “don’ts”   and

o The “wish list” vs. the “must have list”