“Just How Bad Is the Ad Revenue Decline” was the May 7, 2020, headline of a RADIO INK story that began:

Research just released by Media Monitors details exactly how ugly it’s been over the past six weeks.  Between April 13 and April 19, Department Store spending on radio is down 98%, Casinos and Hotels are off 89% and Telecom declined 78%.

On our daily Coronavirus update, radio CEOs have been reporting revenue drops anywhere between 40% and 70%.  As a result, many radio employees have either been let go, furloughed or had their pay cut.

Local radio stations that are not owned by a large group owner such as iHeart, Entercom, Cumulus, Cox or Beasley are like locally owned newspapers – they are dying off in droves because advertisers are pulling their ads.  The RADIO INK story continues:

Some broadcasters have received money from the government’s Payroll Protection Program to help keep employees working.  The NAB has been working Senators and Congressman to make sure any additional government funding gets in the hands of radio station owners as they continue to serve their communities and raise money needed for local food banks and other organizations during this crisis.

If the NAB can’t convince Congress to save these advertising-strapped stations, they might have to resort to prayer, and they can request a prayer from Relevant Radio. 

I had never heard of Relevant Radio until John Kosinski responded via email to one of my blog posts that mentioned the beginning of “Eyewitness News.”  John had been involved in “Eyewitness News” and had worked with its creator, Al Primo, and John filled me on some of the local TV news format’s history.

John’s email made him seem like an interesting person, so I called him.  During the conversation, I asked him what he was doing, and he indicated that he was a host on Relevant Radio.  “Relevant what?”, I asked cluelessly.  I’d been in the media 75 years and radio for 12 in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s, and I had never heard about a radio group named Relevant, so I asked John if I could call him back and learn more. 

In our second call John told me that Relevant Radio is a group of 170 radio stations (101 owned and 65 affiliates) that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church and that reaches a cumulative audience of 220,000,000 (yes, that’s 220 million).  The group has stations in all of the top-10 markets (WNSW-AM in Newark/New York, KHJ-AM in Los Angeles and WKBM-AM in Chicago) and in 23 of the top-25 markets.  The Executive Director of the group is a Catholic Priest, Father Francis Hoffman, who oversees the talk-radio programming that includes “The Inner Life,” “Go Ask Your Father,” “Father Simon Says,” “Family Rosary Across America” and “Daily Mass.”

Relevant Radio has a highly functional, well-designed website that features the tagline “Bringing Christ to the world through the media” and that has a list of stations, programming schedules, a listen function and a page on which anyone can request a prayer.  John told me that the current focus of the programming was to fight the coronavirus pandemic with “facts and faith versus fear,” which seemed like a pretty good idea to me.

John told me that Relevant Radio’s audience was, generally, 55 percent women and people aged 35-60, and that the ratings had increased substantially as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the country, as have donations.  Relevant Radio is healthy as many people turn to prayer to help them cope with the pandemic and a president who gives them no guidance and little hope.

Another thing I learned from John was that president’s favorite talk show host, the bloviator-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings have declined substantially in the last couple of years.  With an audience decline from a high of 26 million to a current audience of 8 million, the nasty Rush has a lot less influence than he and Trump tout.

I’m an Episcopalian, but am not currently a church-going person.  However, after I learned about Relevant Radio, I’m considering requesting a prayer for all of the brown and black older people (probably Democrats) who Rush Limbaugh and Trump don’t seem too concerned about.

Also, requesting a prayer might be the only option left for small-market radio stations not owned by large groups.

The headline of The New York Times’s media critic, Ben Smith’s, March 29 column was: “Bail Out Journalists.  Let Newspaper Chains Die.”  In the column he writes:

The time is now to make a painful but necessary shift: Abandon most for-profit local newspapers, whose business model no longer works, and move as fast as possible to a national network of nimble new online newsrooms.  That way, we can rescue the only thing worth saving about America’s gutted, largely mismanaged local newspaper companies — the journalists.

Smith goes on to write:

The news business, like every business, is looking for all the help it can get in this crisis.  Analysts believe that the new federal aid package will help for a time and that the industry has a strong case to make.  State governments have deemed journalism an essential service to spread public health information.  Reporters employed by everyone from the worthiest nonprofit group to the most cynical hedge fund-owned chain are risking their lives to get their readers solid facts on the pandemic, and are holding the government accountable for its failures.  Virtually every news outlet reports that readership is at an all-time high.  We all need to know, urgently, about where and how the coronavirus is affecting our cities and towns and neighborhoods.

But the advertising business that has sustained the local newspapers — the car dealers, retailers and movie theaters that for generations filled their pages with ads — has gone from slow decline to free fall.

So the leaders trying to get the local news industry through this economic shock need to confront reality.  The revenue from print advertising and aging print subscribers was already going away.  When this crisis is over, it is unlikely to come back.  Some local weeklies recently shut down for good.

Smith, of course, is writing for The New York Times, a newspaper that has managed to be profitable by developing many new revenue streams, including the country’s most popular podcast, ”The Daily,” events, ecommerce and the biggest revenue producer, subscriptions.  I’m sure Smith does not include his newspaper in the category of “for-profit local newspapers” that should be abandoned.

But, is Smith right?  Should we let local newspapers die?  My answer is “yes” for many reasons, two of which are:

First, what should be abandoned is the “paper” part of the word “newspaper.”  We desperately need the news, but we do not need to pay for buggy-whip distribution expenses such as printing presses, paper, delivery trucks and door-to-door carriers.  All those expenses should be used to pay for journalists who publish news content and analysis on the web in a mobile-friendly format.

Second, it takes time – usually six to eight hours – to print and distribute a newspaper, and by the time a paper is delivered the news is old.  In the coronavirus crisis a six- or eight-hour time lag could be fatal.  Internet-delivered news is current and, thus, more valuable.

But making such a shift to the Internet is much easier said than done.  Other than large national newspapers such as The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal that are digitally sophisticated, most small local news organizations are digital technology challenged and do not have the skills or knowledge to get online successfully.

To the rescue: The News Project. 

The News Project, is the brainchild of Merrill Brown, who in 1996 was the founding Editor-in-Chief of MSNBC.  The News Project’s mission is: “To empower journalists, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and investors to launch high-impact news properties rapidly and operate them successfully.” The News Project is a SaaS solution that integrates best-of-breed content, audience and revenue tools that a typical news venture would assemble separately at far greater cost in time, effort and dollars.  If news  and information organizations want to survive, the News Project helps them answer five critical questions laid out by James T. Hamilton in his book All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News:

1. Who cares about information?
2. What are they willing to pay, or others willing to pay to reach those who care about information?  
3. Where can media outlets and advertisers reach them?  
4. When is this profitable?  
5. Why is it profitable?

In a recent interview with Merrill Brown on Zoom, he told me that, “Our team of journalists, technologists, designers and news business professionals provides the resources and expertise news and information entrepreneurs need to launch, sustain and scale their news venture.  The News Project provides:

• State-of-the-art editorial tools and high-performance display templates
• Revenue and member management for subscriptions, sponsorships, metered content, payments and programmatic advertising
• Audience development and engagement tools for social media, Apple News, Google News, email campaigns, push notifications and mobile-optimized layouts
• Enterprise-class managed hosting for scale, security and performance
• Dashboard featuring customized analytics and business metrics
• World-class news and features to supplement your original content

When we talked about the news business, I asked Brown if he thought philanthropy might be a widespread and viable solution for saving local news and mentioned the success of The Atlantic, which Larraine Powell Jobs is the majority (70 percent) owner.  Brown reminded me that the ultimate goal of philanthropists and foundations that might initially support organizations is eventually for them to be sustainable – organizations eventually have to prove that they can bring in enough revenue to sustain themselves.  In the case of news and information organizations this means finding multiple revenue streams such as subscriptions, advertising, events, podcasts, trips, ecommerce and educational opportunities.

Many local news organizations do not have the technical knowledge that enables them to develop multiple revenue streams, to say nothing of the amount of time it takes to execute even if they knew how.  Again, enter the News Project.

The nation needs accurate, truthful local news and information, and must be able to hold government officials at all levels accountable.  Also, news and information organizations need to provide information that is not just about politics but also information about the environment, health-care issues and culture and the arts.  With the aid of the News Project entrepreneurs will be able to provide news and information in these various areas of interest and do so in a sustainable way.

In the 2008 financial crisis the Obama administration was criticized by many economists and politicians to the left of center, especially Elizabeth Warren, for bailing out massive banks which the administration labeled as “too big to fail.” These banks had to be kept solvent so they would keep credit flowing into an economy that was slowing down because of the implosion of sub-prime mortgage derivatives that greedy traders on Wall Street bundled in specious bundles and sold to unsuspecting, but equally greedy investors.

With the infusion of hundred of billions of dollars from the government, the banks didn’t fail and eventually became profitable again because they were, in fact, too big to fail.

Recently the government is looking into Facebook, and the FTC is considering banning the social media gargantuan for integrating Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Reports say the Federal Trade Commission may seek a preliminary injunction against Facebook as soon as next month over concerns that the integration of the messaging services could violate antitrust law.  So, it looks like Facebook might be getting too big. But is it too big to fail?

No. Facebook is now too big to succeed in keeping the world safe from fake news, lies, anti-democracy interference from foreign enemies, and marketing manipulation. Facebook currently has 2.45 billion users, which is almost one-third of the earth’s population. There is no way with this huge number of users who post billions of photos and videos every day that Facebook can adequately police posts and take down abusive racist, hate-filled, bullying, lying posts. Mark Zuckerberg would have to approve hiring of about 10 million people to vet all the posts, photos, videos, and ads that appear on Facebook. He’s not about to do that.

And Mark’s engineers, who are very good, cannot come up with algorithms sophisticated enough to catch inappropriate content in 100 different languages that Facebook supports. And because Facebook will not censure political ads, lies and hate-filled content will proliferate worldwide, especially in America.

What’s the solution? First, if Zuckerberg won’t kick political ads off his service, the government should ban political advertising on all social media and impose huge (billion-dollar) fines for each infraction. The government should also impose fines on Facebook for not stopping foreign countries from placing advocacy ads on its service.

If it cost Facebook $100 million every time they let a Russian ad or post run, the company would find a way to stop them.

One of my sons wrote me the following:

Pop – Didn’t you teach a Media Ethics class at one time in the past? It may be an oxymoron at this point to be sure, but I thought I’d share a quote with you:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Carl Sagan.

Pretty prescient if I do say so myself. The reason I ask about Media Ethics is I want to know your take on the following, which describes how Donald Trump’s presidency represents the cumulative (if not deliberate) failing of the media over decades:

The story of Trump is one of the irresponsibility of all major media outlets, dating back to the 70s. Trump’s presidency is the apotheosis – the ultimate accumulation – of decades of media irresponsibility.

Trump is a fool on the grandest scale, but he is undoubtedly a media genius and a shrewd con man. He’s a con man not only because he exploits people’s misplaced confidence in him, but also because his personal confidence – or more accurately his self-assuredness (even when faked) and consistently brazen disregard for consequences – is so extreme that it resembles psychosis.

The media have failed to shut him down, ignore him, fact-check him, and most importantly, accurately represent the man behind the persona for his entire life. Trump is the ultimate emblem for the 1980s capitalist decadence that has put America and the west on an unsustainable path toward social, cultural, political, environmental, and economic ruin; and the media created this monster.

What they did is perpetuated his persona at face value as a brash, bold visionary businessman that was successful at all things. Trump understood that reporters and journalists will report what he says and will try to report the facts, but won’t actually have any meaningful understanding of what they’re reporting. Cognizant of this, Trump has always said a bunch of self-aggrandizing bullshit – whatever the fuck he wanted to – and the media would present it as such. Giving him any airtime at all – and he got lots of it over the decades – has been representative of one of the grandest follies of American culture.

But of course this is what would happen. We live in a capitalist society. The media are privately owned, and, moreover, Trump is the ultimate symbol of capitalism. In real life he represents all its evils and failings, but in our media-cultivated pop culture, he more conspicuously represented all of its lascivious allure.

The media is utterly complicit in crafting the Trump brand – an image built entirely on lies, fraud, and criminality – and they’re complicit in perpetuating it. Even though outlets are now overtly critical of Trump, they consistently and knowingly give him a platform to spew lies.

This was all true long before “The Apprentice” and it’s still ongoing. Any way, why would it stop? Trump is the press’s wet dream. They presented him as a visionary when he extorted tax abatements for his Manhattan real estate projects (from the Commodore, to Trump Tower, to the Taj Mahal), when he opened the dismal failure that was the Taj Mahal, when he starred on “The Apprentice,” and in every single endeavor he’s ever undertaken before he overtly entered politics (he’s always been a presence of political propaganda).

Looking back through the past few decades at all the celebrities at his events, the commentary on his weddings and extravagance, the sycophantic contestants on “The (Celebrity) Apprentice,” the WWE promotions, the commercials he starred in, etc. It’s disturbing how blindly and irresponsibly complicit just about everyone was. He was a known criminal the entire time.

Ultimately, though, and more terrifyingly, this is representative more of the impossibility of accurate media in a capitalist society than it is a story of one single con-man’s rise to power. Trump is emblematic of all the ills of American society; he is not an isolated seed of evil. People have consistently been falling all over themselves to buy his obvious bullshit, and have never stopped, not only with Trump, but with countless others as well.

People are brands. Trump is the preeminent branding PR expert. We’ve proven eager to buy the bullshit of all kinds of other brands, time and time again.” 

Following is my replay to my intelligent and frustrated son:

Son – Yes, I taught a Media Ethics graduate course for many years.  I really enjoyed teaching it, and am a little disappointed that I’m not still teaching it, especially at this critical junction in our country’s history.  Today I read a column by the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan in which she makes a similar point that you make about the press’s problems in covering politics. In the column she refers to the recent sexist, horse-race coverage of Elizabeth Warren to whom yesterday I made a campaign contribution, the same as I did in 2016 when I supported her instead of Hillary until Warren dropped out of the race. I hope she is the Democratic candidate.  She was in 2016 and today is the most qualified candidate to take on what I consider the biggest problem the country faces — inequality and the control of politics by big money, banks, and Wall Street.

But on to your criticism of the media, which I am still involved in to a great degree as I write the fifth edition of Media Selling, which, as the title indicates, is about selling advertising which supports the media that you criticize. And there is the dilemma: the business model of the news media that has evolved over the years is one that is primarily supported by advertising, and selling advertising is based on how many eyeballs or ears a medium reaches.  As Lawrence Lessig writes in his insightful book America, Compromised, one of the problems that today’s press has is that its stories and articles are measured — how many people clicked on a headline and how many people read and how much they read of an article.  News stories are not evaluated based on how intelligently they deal with an issue that people need to know about, but are evaluated based on how many people looked at the article (or, rather, viewed the advertising embedded in the article).

There is no easy fix.  The root of the problem is not the media, because the ad-supported media, in order to survive, must be, in essence, a mirror of its audiences’ values, tastes and instincts. The problem is homo sapiens.  Humans are wired according to millions of years of a survival-of-the fittest instinct to give their attention to threatening, out-of-the-ordinary things — to the tiger in the bushes.  We are, therefore, attracted to the dangerous, the outrageous, the fear-inducing – to Trump-like outliers.

In addition we’ve changed from a society in America in the 1960s and 1970s that watched the nightly news on one of three television networks, most often to CBS and Walter Cronkite.  All adults in the country got a similar version of the same down-the-middle news.  American had a common, short-video-clip understanding of the news.  Because network and TV station news was down the middle of the political spectrum so as to appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to sell that audience to advertisers, there was a homogenized, simplified, balanced version of the news everyone received.  It was balanced because of a government (FCC) regulation called the Fairness Doctrine.

But conservatives and Republicans (mostly) didn’t like the Fairness Doctrine, and it was repealed in 1987.  When broadcasters realized they didn’t have to be fair, Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio proliferated, supported by local and national advertisers who wanted to reach older men, the primary audience of talk radio.  Fox News followed in October, 1996, with its conservative, Republican, propaganda-skewed approach to the news.  Fox News’s founder, Roger Ailes, knew there were two things Rupert Murdoch cared about: (1) money and (2) conservative politics. So money (advertising dollars) was the driver of the Fox News approach.  By concentrating on an older, conservative, primarily male market niche, Fox News decided to focus on a niche and differentiate itself with a right-wing approach from CNN, MSBC, and CNN Headline News, which were all traditionally in the bland middle, so it could get higher ratings.  Ailes hired a lot of beautiful women to deliver the news because he knew that’s what old men liked to look at.

As Fox News became more conservative, to differentiate themselves so they could sell advertising, CNN and MSNBC tilted to the left, and, thus, political polarization began to increase. With this polarization, the notion of a single entity known as “the media” became outmoded.  There is no such entity as the “the media.”  What conservatives mean when they say “the media is biased” is “the media we don’t like such as MSNBC, CNN and The New York Times are biased.  Fox News is not biased, they are ‘fair and balanced.’”  The era of confirmation bias was accelerating at break-neck speed

Then America and the world was transformed and disrupted by the Internet. In his book Going to Extremes, Cass Sunstein writes about how Google and Facebook have accelerated group polarization by allowing people to interact with articles and news sources that (1) titillate them and (2) reinforce their values, and confirm their biases.  Google and Facebook are now the dominant media channels in America.  You cannot bunch Google, Facebook, MSNBC, Fox News, NBC-TV, CBS-TV, ABC-TV, ESPN, the Discovery Channels, and Rush Limbaugh under one umbrella called “the media.”  Today, more people of all ages get their news from Facebook than from any other news source.  Twitter is probably the main source of breaking news. Can you imagine a Trump voter in North Dakota following Paul Krugman on Twitter?  No. The Internet allows people to wallow in their preconceived notions, prejudices and fantasies.

If you blame the media for the Trump catastrophe, you have to also blame capitalism, advertising, our representative form of democracy that allows for someone to lose the popular vote by over three million votes and become president, the electoral college, gerrymandering, and the compete corruption of the political system and process by money (those who can afford lobbying — big tech, big oil, big banks, gun manufacturers, broadcasters). They — and we — are all to blame, and if we are going to change things, we each have to accept personal responsibility for change and not pass blame off to the media, or to conservatives or to Trump.  If we want to change, we have to have a thoughtful dialog about how we are going to care for people who have been put out of work by automation and the inevitable outsourcing of manufacturing, for people who cannot afford health care, for people from other countries who want asylum, and for a ballooning senior population.  We must be personally accountable for resisting the current insanity and chaos, for electing sane adults to office and for changing the rigged system. Only a few, less popular media channels such as Mother Jones are going to do that. We have to step up and get involved and vote.

I am in the process of writing the fifth edition of my textbook, Media Selling, that is the most widely used book in the field and has been adopted by over 70 colleges and universities in America and internationally.

In Chapter 2: Selling in the Internet Era, I write that there are four new approaches to selling that are completely different from approaches to selling in the pre-Internet era:

• New approach #1 – Serving the customer
• New approach #2 – Focus on customer success
• New approach #3 – Selling as educating
• New approach #4 – Algorithms are the competition

Serving the customer Pre-Internet media selling emphasized maximizing revenue, which in radio and television often meant the sales managers would preempt up to half of a schedule to take higher-rate spots. These preemptions caused broadcast salespeople, especially those in television, to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with makegoods, which also meant that an inordinate amount of buyers’ time was spent the same way, to their vast frustration and anger. Amazon has become consumers’ favorite brand because Amazon puts the customer first, so legacy media companies have had to adjust and start thinking as much, if not more, about how to keep customers than how to get them, which means they have to treat their customers (advertisers) as well as Amazon, Google and Facebook do.

Also, the notion of serving customers appeals to younger, Millennial media salespeople, a majority of whom are women, who get satisfaction from serving, from helping others rather than tricking buyers into paying higher rates or dealing with makegoods.

Focus on customer success By focusing on getting results for an advertiser and not slamming down a deal, salespeople become partners with their customers and agencies. The duopoly, Google and Facebook, have become dominant because of their partnership approach, ease of use, and ability to target specific audiences.

Selling as educating Persuasion and the hard sell doesn’t work with sophisticated and harried buyers. Virtually all media selling and buying today is cross-platform – involves digital advertising in some way – and digital and mobile are complicated and vastly multi-dimensional. Buyers don’t need to be hawked or sold, they need help in understanding how to best use digital, mobile and legacy media in a variety of combinations that get results for their advertisers.

Algorithms are the competition The biggest competition, by far, for sellers and buyerss is not other media salespeople or other agencies, it’s algorithms. AI and algorithms can plan, negotiate, buy, and serve ads in milliseconds – infinitely faster and better than planners can plan, buyers can buy and salespeople can implement orders. But algorithms can only function based on data that was gathered by activity that occurred in the past. They are prediction machines based on a book of the same name.[i] Algorithms aren’t good at innovation, coming up with new ideas, or creativity. And, most important, they can’t give hugs. They have no emotional intelligence.

Therefore, if buyers and salespeople are going to survive the coming wave of automation of their job functions, they’d better learn to emphasize what makes them human, what they can do that algorithms can’t – give love, compassion, hugs (emotional hugs in this era of #MeToo) and be creative.

I’ve been involved in media since my 60-year old son was born, and over the years I have met (and trained) thousands of sellers and buyers. Over those years, I have met more dumb salespeople than dumb buyers. The vast majority of buyers and planners that I know are smart, curious, and horrendously overworked, especially in the big holding company sweat shops. They desperately need emotional support, connection, compassion and hugs – all the things algorithms, robots, and AI can’t give.

Therefore, media salespeople who sell primarily with numbers, rational arguments and data collected in the past need to ask themselves what they can give planners and buyers that their main competition, algorithms, can’t. Of course the answer is love, compassion and emotional hugs.

Get to work, sellers!

[i] Agrawal, Ajay, Gans, Joshua, and Godfarb, Avi. 2018. Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Harvard Business School Press.

I teach in the graduate Media Management Program in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. One of the courses I teach is Media Sales and Sales Management. In the first class of the semester I ask students to introduce themselves, tell us where they work and tell us why they are taking the class. In a class of 20 students (the School of Media Studies caps most classes at 20), 75 percent of the students are women, and typically the majority of all of the students are working in the media – internships, social media, small ad agencies, etc. I then ask the class to raise their hands if they plan to have a career in sales.

In over 30 years of teaching a media sales class – a graduate class at The New School and an undergraduate class at the University of Missouri School of Journalism – based on my textbook, Media Selling — I have had perhaps a total of five hands raised over the years. I probably would have had a similar response if I had asked the students how many of them wanted to live in the middle of the Sahara desert.

When I probe and ask students why they are not interested in media sales as a career, the responses I get vary widely, but they are generally based on some sort of negative image of salespeople. The words I get are “pushy,” “salesman” and “dishonest.” If I were to ask an artist to draw a composite picture from the descriptions I get, it would be of a cigarette-smoking, unbuttoned-shirt clad, glad-handing, balding man, which is the most prominent image I get when I Google “salesperson.”

The reality of media sales is totally different from the common stereotype:

• Over 50 percent of all radio and television salespeople are women (stations, networks and reps).
• The top sales job in three of the four major television networks are held by women (Ad Sales President Rita Ferro at Disney-ABC, President of Network Sales Jo Ann Ross at CBS and Chairman, Advertising Sales and Client Partnerships Linda Yaccarino at NBC).
• The top sales job in the largest radio company in the U.S., iHeart Media is held by Michele Laven, President of Business Development and Partnerships.
• The top two sales jobs in the number-one newspapers company by circulation in the country, Gannett, are held by women – Sharon Rowlands, President USA Today Network Marketing Solutions and Maribel Wadsworth, President USA Today Network and Publisher of USA Today.
• The top two sales jobs at the second largest media company in the world Facebook, which gathers in more ad revenue than the four television networks, iHeart and Gannett combined, are held by women – Carloyn Everson, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions and Nada Stirratt, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions, U.S. and Canada.
• At the number-one media company in the world, Google, that gobbles up more ad revenue than Facebook, the four television networks, iHeart Media and Gannett combined, the co-head of sales is Lorraine Twohill, who is a Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer and heads sales with Phillipp Schindler, Senior VP and Chief Business Officer.

Clearly media sales play against stereotype. Women dominate the media sales and sales management ecosystem. Why? Are women better at selling and managing salespeople?

In the last 30 years of experience in sales, sales management, sales consulting and training for hundreds of television, radio stations, networks, newspapers and magazines and as a V.P. of Sales Strategy and Development for AOL, my answer is “yes.”

I’ve also asked many television, radio, newspaper, magazine and digital sales executives and CEOs why women are better salespeople and sales managers than men. The answers I get range from “more empathetic,” “higher emotional intelligence (EQ)” to “more nurturing.” It’s the last answer that I think holds the key because it is consistent with (1) the disruption in the sales process brought on by the Internet and digital advertising and (2) research on what motivates people.

The Internet, primarily Google’s AdWords, completely disrupted the media sales process. TV and radio had previously been sold and prices negotiated based on scarcity. The Internet created virtually infinite and highly targeted ad inventory, and pricing was determined by online auction, not by competitive negotiating between sellers trying to maximize revenue and buyers trying to get bargain-basement prices. Programmatic buying and selling of digital advertising acerbated the disruption and threatened to disintermediate traditional media buyers and sellers.

Therefore, media salespeople, led by those at Google and then Facebook, had to stop selling competitively for share of budget and had to focus on educating buyers and customers about the complexities of digital advertising and had to be concerned primarily about customers being successful – nurturing in other words. Titles with “partnerships” in them began to replace titles with “sales” in them.

Research in evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience identified an altruism gene – an instinct to help, to cooperate and to serve. Research has indicated that in many cultures people were happier when they do something for someone else than when they do something for themselves (see Johann Hari’s Lost Connections). Daniel Pink’s convincing book Drive showed that the vast majority of people are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose, not necessarily money first (present president excepted). Thus, having a nurturing, helping purpose and helping others be successful, is a more productive and rewarding sales approach today than maximizing revenue or selling to get the highest share of budgets were in the past.

This is the message I give to the students in my Media Sales and Sales Management class and that I’m explaining more thoroughly in the fifth edition of Media Selling to be published next January.

This past fall I got so sick of getting innumerable, annoying robo calls that I downloaded the app YouMail, which dealt with the problem perfectly.

The YouMail app is free for handling up to 20 calls a month. You download the app, allow it access to your Contacts and it answers any call that you don’t pick up on. So when my phone rings, if there is no name in my contacts that appears on my iPhone screen and if I don’t recognize the number, I don’t answer the call, the YouMail bot answers it and sends me both an email and a text that I got a call. I can read the text of the call or listen to it if I want to. Cool.

If someone in my Contacts calls and I don’t answer my phone, YouMail answers it by intoning robotically, “Hello, Julia…Charles…is not available. Please leave a message.” I like having the greeting personalized, even though it’s obviously a bot. For those calls from numbers not in my Contacts, the message is simply, “Charles is not available. Please leave a message.”

Just before Christmas I got a call from an interest-rate scam (so labeled by YouMail). Scammers rarely leave a message, but this one did. The scam bot replied to my YouMail bot by leaving a mechanical message that I had just two days to reply to get a special low-interest-rate deal. I loved it – bots talking to bots. Untouched by human hands, voices or thoughts.

I guess because I was bored – the semester in which I teach two graduate courses was over – and because I was avoiding helping my wife put up Christmas decorations (the avoidance is a yearly ritual), I opened the YouMail scam message and listened to it and guffawed. The voice on the scam bot was the same voice, or one uncannily similar, as the one on the YouMail. Bots talking to bots in the same voice – no emotion, mechanical, totally uncaring, totally robotic.

So are the bots communicating? According to classic communication theory, for effective communication to occur, there has to be seven elements: a Source, a Channel, a Message, a Receiver, Listening, Understanding, and Feedback. In the bot- to-bot exchange there was a Source (the scam bot), a Channel (phones), a Message (the scam), and a Receiver (the YouMail bot). But did the YouMail technically listen to the message or merely record it? Did the YouMail bot understand the message? No. The YouMail bot could have cared less what the message was even though it recognized that it was a scam.

So was this bot conversation communication? Probably not according to classic communication theory. Was this bot conversation Artificial Intelligence? AI hasn’t really progressed to the point that it’s really intelligent yet.

If the YouMail bot was smart, it would have replied, “You *#?@%# son-of-bitch! How dare you waste my time with a *#?@%# scam!” And if the scam bot was really smart, it would have replied, “Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry for bothering you while you were picking your nose and avoiding helping your wife.”

In other words, AI has not yet mastered communication – real listening and understanding and feedback. Real human beings still have an edge in communicating, in listening, in understanding and in empathetic responses.

Maybe we’ll get to the point in a year or so when AI can effectively communicate – like responding to Donald Trump’s tweets with understanding.

On Halloween of this year representatives of Google, Facebook and Twitter appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee, and the senators who quizzed them treated them like they were wearing Pinocchio costumes.

qqBoth Democratic and Republican senators questioned the companies about Russia’s attempt to spread disinformation and discord on Google’s YouTube and on social media – Twitter and Facebook – by lamenting the Kremlin’s efforts to disrupt and tip the 2016 presidential election toward Donald Trump. The angry lawmakers stressed the need for Facebook, Google and Twitter to prevent this tampering from happening ever again.

In the middle of November 15 Democratic senators asked the Federal Election Commission to ensure that online political ads display disclaimers stating who paid for the advertising. “The FEC must close the loopholes that have allowed foreign adversaries to sow discord and misinform the American electorate,” Senators Mark Warner (Virginia) and Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Claire McCaskill (Missouri) and a dozen others wrote, according to Media Daily News.

However, as the old idiom suggests, politicians should “be careful what they wish for lest it comes true.”

Consider this: If the government regulates political advertising, it is giving digital media, primarily Google, Facebook and Twitter rules on how to label political communication. If these companies follow the rules, they just might tow the line assiduously and then adopt the position that they are “following orders” and wash their hands of taking corporate responsibility for or being accountable for further action.

However, as malicious hackers have continually demonstrated, digital rules and guidelines are merely temporary problems that are challenges they relish in tackling and hacking. So the algorithms that Google, Facebook and Twitter write to follow government-imposed rules and regulations could be hacked and compromised almost as soon as they are instituted.

Eventually, the media platform companies might be able to write algorithms that have good editorial judgment and taste, but probably not for several years. So what should the government do in the meantime, impose rules and regulations?

A look at the history of media regulations might be instructive. Before the invention of radio, the media consisted primarily of newspapers and magazines, which were not regulated by the government. Publishers used their Constitutional guarantee freedom of speech to publish what they wanted, to be as partisan and as contentious as they felt like.

But when radio broadcasting was invented, because it used the public airwaves to distribute its signals, the government regulated radio stations. The stations were given a license to broadcast on a designated frequency as long as they served the “public good, convenience and necessity.” Later, when television came on the scene, TV stations were given the same public-service mandate.

When I was a V.P. of CBS in 1970, the CBS-owned radio and TV stations were required by corporate policy to have a community affairs director who ascertained the needs and interest of the local community and an editorial director who researched and wrote editorials for the general manager to deliver on the air. CBS took seriously its obligation to serve the communities where its stations were located.

Reputable newspapers, such as the New York Times, even though the government did not regulate them, liked to have an editorial environment that was brand safe, that appealed to advertisers who were concerned about their ads appearing near inappropriate content. Thus, the Times does not allow X-rated films or breast-enlargement advertising to appear in its pages or on its website.

Decisions about serving communities and not running X-rated films are matters of judgment and taste, which algorithms have yet to master. Top executives at Google, Facebook and Twitter and other digital and social media platforms need to make decisions about the social responsibility of their businesses. Duty to society must take priority over shareholder value, and good taste must take priority over higher profits for the long-term health of their businesses.

Of course marketers, advertisers and their agencies can’t dictate social responsibility and good taste to publishers and platforms, but they can be more vigilant about blacklisting irresponsible, bad-taste content. To implement this vigilance it’s better to concentrate on advertising effectiveness rather than efficiency, especially in programmatic, which often finds content that is brand toxic.

A guideline for safe content should be that which uplifts, or at a minimum doesn’t diminish, human dignity. Note that it is a guideline, not a regulation, and overall guidelines force the content aggregators such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to take active responsibility for their content and use good judgment and good taste rather than merely follow orders.

In a report on Wednesday, Jan. 25, Google announced its increased regulation of advertising and linked-to websites about a week after President Donald Trump vowed to cut Federal regulations by 75%.

Google must have figured that if Trump’s administration wasn’t going to care as much as President Obama’s administration did about protecting consumers, it had better step up its efforts to protect people from dishonest advertising such weight-loss schemes, fake news, pay-day loans, porn, “trick-to-click” ads and many other online scams.

In 2016 Google took down 1.7 billion ads that violated its advertising guidelines and policies. This number is up from 718 million ads Google took down in 2015.

In addition to fake ads, many fake news sites were also banned. Often scam sites use the “.co” domain name instead instead of “.com” in an attempt to fool potential readers. According to Recode:

Also among those the removed ads were what Google calls “tabloid cloakers.” These advertisers run what look like links to news headlines, but when the user clicks, an ad for a product such as a weight loss supplement pops up. Google suspended 1,300 accounts engaged in tabloid cloaking in 2016.

So, this is a shout out to Google for being transparent and publicizing what it is doing in terms self-regulation to protect consumers. I’m sure that Google understands that it is much better to regulate itself rather than have the government get in the act. Even though Google, through its parent company, Alphabet, has one of, if not the biggest lobbying organizations in Washington, it still needs to protect its reputation with its users, who are virtually the entire population of the free world (the Chinese government blocks Google) and regulate itself before the government, even the Trump government, does.

I was surprised that sites selling beer and tobacco were included on the list of “Prohibited Content” (sites on which Google ads may not be placed). Sites that sell wine and champagne are OK. Although the difference in acceptability between beer and wine escapes me, perhaps this distinction reflects the taste of Google’s founders, Page and Brin. But nevertheless, Google has policies and promotes them.

Facebook, on the other hand, has not been quite as transparent or as forthright about its attempts to counteract false advertising and fake news. It did announce in December that it was outsourcing the determination of fake news to five third-party organizations: Snopes, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and the Associated Press. And last November, Facebook announced that fake news websites will be prohibited from using its Audience Network Ads, but the announcement came right after Google announced a similar policy.

Google has been the proactive, transparent leader in trying to weed out false advertising and fake news, Facebook has been the hooded follower. Let’s hope that Google continues to get stronger in self-regulation and that Facebook continues to follow suit and isn’t Trumped in doing so.

Google is doing the right thing for its users, and is being rewarded for it in its market cap of $583.56 billion (1/25/2017) on the NASDAQ, a record high, and the second highest market cap (to Apple) in the world. Facebook’s market cap is $378.9 billion on the NASDAQ, so it should be chasing Google.

I enthusiastically accompanied my wife, Julia, to Washington over this past weekend to participate in the Million Women March, and I’m so glad I did because it was a thrilling and surprising experience.

Thrilling because I have never seen so many peaceful, friendly, joyous people in one place. We were packed in like smiling sardines on the Metro and in the streets. Surprising because of the makeup and mood of the throngs. The makeup of the crowds was amazingly diverse, yet harmonious — of one mind — and that mind was resistance to President Trump and his words, actions and policies.

There were contingents of women from Wellesley, Smith and other colleges. There were mothers with their young and old daughters, there were young men pushing old women in wheel chairs and there were a surprisingly large number of men — fathers, husbands, boyfriends and sons gladly supporting their daughters, wives, girlfriends and mothers and grandmothers. It was inspiring.

The mood of the throngs I saw at 3rd and C Streets S.W. and within a several-block area were warm, friendly and fun. The costumers and signs were as diverse as the crowds were, and many of them were hysterically funny. At times I felt like I was back at Burning Man, a similar non-judgmental, harmonious, accepting and giving atmosphere.

Julia admired the gold-painted shower caps (“golden shower”) worn by a family, and one of the men in the family promptly gave her a shower cap, which she wore the rest of day — a gift just like at Burning Man.

One of my favorite posters (there were many of them) was a large (maybe 4′ X 3′) one that had an image of Princess Leia from Star Wars: A New Hope holding a blaster on it with the text “WOMEN BELONG IN THE RESISTANCE” over the image.

The Star Wars films are the most popular series of films in the history of movies.  The latest film in the series, Star Wars: Rogue One, had a monster opening weekend this past December of $155 million in North America and $135 million globally to make it the second highest grossing movie that ever opened in December, second only to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This stupendous opening completely thwarted attempts by a right-wing group on social media (#DumpStarWars) to boycott the movie, which prominent conservative conspiracy theorist Mark Dice called “feminist propaganda.”

The final scene of Rogue One shows a CGI image of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia looking at the stolen plans of the Death Star and saying “hope!” I have a wild guess that this message of “hope” may have inspired the “WOMEN BELONG IN THE RESISTANCE” posters of Princess Leia at the Million Women March.

What is not speculation is that Donald Trump is most unpopular president in the history of the country. And contrary to the claims of the new president and his wooden puppet (Pinocchio) Sean Spicer, the crowds at the Million Women’s March were much larger than the crowds at 45’s inauguration. Therefore, referencing Star Wars and its feminine hero the day after 45’s inauguration was appropriate because it put in context the stark contrast between the crowds at the inauguration and the protesting crowds the following day and it put in contrast the difference between the popular Star Wars female hero and the unpopular male president.

How satisfying it must be to Carrie Fisher’s family and friends that her Star Wars character, Princess Leia, is more popular than the president of the United States and that Carrie’s immortal character has become a symbol of resistance.

George Lucas’s creation of the Star Wars world was driven by technology, computer-generated graphics (CGI), which changed the way movies were made. The Million Women’s March was driven by technology, too. Without the ability to coordinate protest marches world wide via Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms and without world-wide media coverage, a protest in which an estimated three million global participants, such a massive, diverse mass of people could not have gathered.

The media, particularly social media, made the world-wide protest possible. And as Clay Shirky writes in his ground-breaking book, Here Comes Everybody, a revolution in social organization has commenced, and in today’s world connections are more important than media content, as posited in The Content Trap by Bharat Anand of the Harvard Business School. Donald Trump took advantage of this revolution and direct connection when he used Twitter to communicate directly to America without a traditional media filter. He connected, but so did those who oppose him. Therefore, the new communications and connection technologies cut both ways, help both sides.

What alternative world will most Americans want to live in? Trump’s surreal world of anger, of hate, of America first (and only) and of female denigration or the Star Wars unreal world of anti-authoritarianism, of honoring diversity, of galaxy-wide justice and of female empowerment? Both worlds seem surreal, are post-reality, alternative truth worlds where villains become popular idols and where evil empires rule. We don’t  know the end of either story yet, but we have to develop a new hope that the resistance will eventually win. However, it will probably take at least four years.