NBC's New Ad Sales Approach: What's Old Is New Again

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried an interesting piece in the Media&Marketing Section regarding advertising.

The piece, by Brian Steinberg, featured the changes in ad marketing and sales being wrought by NBC's new ad-sales chief, Michael Pilot, late of GE's Commercial Finance Group.

Apparently, Pilot has "a history of using sophisticated analytical methods to generate sales growth."

Twenty-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student at Penn, we learned these sorts of techniques from the then-resident expert Professors, Len Lodish and Jerry Wind. The use of prior sales data from which to build models of most-likely buyers, and more productive sales and marketing efforts, is hardly new.

I think it's wonderful that NBC is making use of someone with Mr. Pilot's tendencies. Beyond his focus on more analytical sales planning, Pilot is also redesigning the entire sales and fulfillment process, something consultants like my old outfit, Andersen cum Accenture, likes to call 'business process re-engineering,' to be more efficient, automated, and electronic.

All this is, frankly, pretty obvious, low-hanging fruit. The question you should have, that I have, is, what took GE, the parent of NBC Universal, so long to effect this change? As I've written in prior posts, GE is too large to be effectively managed anymore for consistently superior total returns to shareholders. This is an excellent example of why I believe this to be so.

How does one justify viewing GE as either visionary, or well-led, if something so large and prominent as the ad sales function in one of its six business groups, is so hopelessly antiquated and poorly-managed?

I think this also speaks to the reality of business education in America, and, possibly, the world. Michael Pilot is most certainly not the only business school graduate to have learned these techniques over the past thirty years. Where are all the other graduates with similar knowledge, and their successful sales management changes?

Where does all that learning, knowledge and skill go? Thousands of graduates from the top ten or so US business schools in the past few decades, and when one of them actually implements a decades-old idea, it's considered breaking news in the Wall Street Journal.

How sad.