How Pricing in the Broadcast Advertising Industry Works with Dominick Latorre

Dominick Latorre is the Senior Director of Yield and Inventory Management at Sinclair Broadcast Group. He used to be the Manager of Pricing and Planning at Spectrum Reach, and he's the Assistant General Manager of the Men's National Team in USA Ball Hockey.

In this episode, Dominick explains how they price slots for broadcast advertisements as he relates it to how airlines do pricing for their seats.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn how Sinclair does pricing for perishable inventory like ads
• Understand how it's related to how airlines price their seats
• Find out why it's important that your sales people know how to make sure that your service is priced effectively

"It's educating yourself on different industries outside of yours and how you can take those concepts and those ideas and apply them to your business.

– Dominick Latorre

Topics Covered:

02:01 – How Dominick got into pricing

04:12 – Sinclair's goal to improve efficiencies with the local pricing experts and revenue with pricing

06:41 – "It is not what I wanted. It's not what I wanted to buy."

09:25 – Relating and comparing how Sinclair does pricing to how airlines price their seats

14:46 – The factors that affect how Sinclair price the programs

18:38 – Pricing for political campaigns

23:01 – Pricing table topics: "Create real value with differentiation. Create perceived value with marketing."

25:36 – Dominick's pricing advice

Key Takeaways:

"I'm very happy with the choice I made back in 2007-ish to get into pricing, because as obviously as you know, it's the biggest driver of profit if you're priced correctly, so much more than sales volume or anything else." – Dominick Latorre

"With the various choices for marketing dollars these days, you can't be upsetting clients and pulling multi-million-dollar deals because we weren't priced effectively and given them a rate that from day one it should have been a premium program; obviously, the demand is there. We should be charging it based upon that." – Dominick Latorre

"You can drive more revenue by lowering your rates, and we've seen that in some cases." – Dominick Latorre

"We talk to our sellers all the time. Sell the value of the program. Don't combine it with other solutions. Don't sell a customer what we call a 9A4P rotator, where basically that customer spot could fall anywhere between that time period. That's not selling value. Look at the value of our solutions and price accordingly to them." – Dominick Latorre

"With so many marketing solutions out there and dollars to be spent, you have to make sure that you're priced effectively. And again, talking about value, making sure that the buyers see the value in your solution." – Dominick Latorre

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Sinclair Broadcast Group: https://sbgi.net/
• Professional Pricing Society: https://www.pricingsociety.com/

Connect with Dominick Latorre:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicklatorre/
• Email: dmlatorre@sbgtv.com

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mailto:mark@impactpricing.com