Incentives are some of the most reliable tools in the arsenal for shaping human behavior, both in business and in society. Tax breaks are an incentive. So are bonuses.
Throughout the history of newspapers, it’s been a good idea to sell your limited ad space to the “highest bidder.” In other words, it’s been more profitable to have a trained sales staff convince big-budget national companies to run expensive campaigns in your daily print product.
As a result, you would to create incentives for your sales team, encouraging them to sell those national campaigns: they get a cut of the take.
This was a great idea right up to the point when it became a better idea to sell zillions of smaller ads to smaller customers. The internet means that the space you have to serve ads is virtually limitless, and the price you can charge for ad placement is dramatically reduced (after all, ad space like yours is available on a million other local web sites through Google AdSense).
Now the incentives structure needs to catch up with the revenue model. At the moment you have an ad sales team that is working against you, because they are still trying to sell big campaigns to big advertisers. That way they get a nice fat commission.
Why should they sell a local dry cleaning shop a $300 ad when they can make way more by selling to Sony?
Ultimately, your ad team is going to shrink drastically or disappear. In the immediate future, you need to build a self-service local ad system, or use a prefabricated system like AdReady, and assign one or two evangelists to go out into your local community and teach small business owners how to use it.
The internet makes it possible for you to have a self-sustaining ad service, without a giant sales team. Not only will you make more money and fill more inventory, you’ll be reducing your costs as well. That sounds like a win-win to me.
If this type of talk gets you going in the mornings, you should check out The Pitch, a local event on the future of publishing.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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Hey Jason,
I’m a PR guy and enjoy reading your posts. Did you read the speech Rupert Murdoch gave yesterday on the future of newspapers? http://tinyurl.com/5bj7gh. Good fodder for your ongoing discussion.
–Nathan
“and assign one or two evangelists to go out into your local community and teach small business owners how to use it”
I’m with you directionally but this statement is a little too loaded to just slip in and solve the problem so late in your argument. Those evangelists better be very talented. We’re dealing with this scenario with our Neighborlogs local advertising system. It’s designed for self-service at the small to medium level. Our best hope is that people are learning about advertising online so we don’t always have to start at step 0. But be ready to be pioneers. It’s not easy to be a pioneer, btw. I’ll talk more about this if it comes up in the December The Pitch session.
jseattle – I’m totally in agreement that it’s not an easy task. I spent 2004 and 2005 trying to talk businesses into blogging, and the “teaching why” part constitutes a huge amount of overhead.
But that’s just the point, is that newspapers need to do something immediately to start supplementing existing revenue.
Is it better for a local newspaper to have two evangelists slowly working their way through the local business community, or should they have nobody, and let someone else (like you) get to it first?
Slow going it still going.