How a Sickly Kid from Toronto Built a Media Empire and What Local Sales Pros Can Learn Today
Ted Rogers, born into hardship after the early death of his father, overcame health issues and financial setbacks to build one of Canada’s largest media and telecommunications empires. Starting with a struggling FM radio station, he bet on emerging technologies and turned Rogers Communications into a powerhouse spanning radio, TV, wireless, and sports. His success was driven by relentless work ethic, visionary thinking, and a willingness to take bold risks when others hesitated. Rogers believed in long-term relationships, customer value, and giving back—donating millions to education, healthcare, and civic causes. His story teaches media sales and ad professionals that resilience, innovation, and purpose-driven leadership are the keys to lasting success.

We all know how important it is to prospect consistently and to do the work before you present so you are well-prepared every time you see a potential client. The business of sales is largely about being connective, highly relational, and consistently appearing helpful to potential clients until they think of you as “in their inner circle.”

You may not remember the time when large, enterprise-level organizations required you to complete an RFP (request for proposal). However, you wouldn’t be the only salesperson competing for the client’s business. Depending on the size of the opportunity, you might have a dozen or more rivals answering the same questions and prompts. If you find yourself in a situation where you must respond to an RFP, you may be asked to complete the same RFP two or three times, even though the company has made no changes.

BrightEdge’s 2025 industry report shows that AI-driven search is growing rapidly, but organic search remains the dominant driver of conversions and brand visibility. While AI referrals account for less than 1% of total traffic today, they are doubling month over month, signaling a major shift in how consumers discover products and services. For local media sales reps and ad agencies, this means combining traditional SEO with strategies that help clients appear in AI-generated results—through structured data, authoritative content, and local media mentions. The report emphasizes that local credibility and trusted content are becoming essential signals for AI models, giving local publishers and agencies a competitive edge. The key takeaway: success in 2025 requires selling not just impressions, but discoverability across both search and AI ecosystems.

As a sales manager, it’s crucial to avoid common pitfalls that can negatively impact team performance. Here’s how to navigate ten key mistakes: Assuming Everyone Works Like You: Establish clear KPIs to guide different working styles. Hiring Based Solely on Experience: Prioritize performance over experience. Delaying Firings: Act quickly when someone isn’t performing. Failing to Identify Bad Reps: Remove toxic or unproductive reps promptly. Relying on Activity over Results: Focus on outcomes, not just activity. Allowing Low Win Rates: Coach reps, but don’t tolerate chronic underperformance.

When you’re “King of the Hill,” challengers, pretenders and wannabes come at you from all sides. For “traditional” TV, it started with videocassettes and videodiscs, then cable and satellite, DVD/Blu-Ray, game consoles, the DVR, PCs, smartphones and tablets, and now streaming media services: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube and an ever growing list of even newer players.

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 200,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our newsletter. How effectively do you help your teams arrive at their own solutions rather than giving a solution to them? Very effectively: Almost everything we do is the team’s idea: 17.52%

Radio and music listeners and advertisers have more choices, which has led to industry consolidation and renewed efforts at the federal level to de-regulate ownership rules. A major consolidation announced during February 2017 was the proposed merger of Entercom and CBS Radio, which would make the combined company more competitive with #1 iHeartMedia. These consolidations will affect local markets

I listen to a lot of sales calls. Recordings of client sellers in calls/meetings. Sometimes webcasts where someone is talking about call strategies and going through role plays. This week, it was on creating urgency with questions. So much of it begins to look like a game of pint pong.

Large language models are rapidly becoming standard tools in advertising—speeding up planning, reporting and workflow—but they’re still being kept away from the moment where real ad dollars are actually spent. Across agencies and ad-tech platforms, the industry is drawing a firm line between automation that helps humans move faster and automation that replaces humans at the point of financial accountability. The hesitation isn’t just cultural; it’s driven by flawed measurement signals, unreliable bidstream data, and the risk of scaling today’s attribution blind spots into machine-driven decisions. For now, the industry is modernizing infrastructure and using LLMs in orchestration layers, while keeping core bidding logic deterministic—because the real battle is less about AI capability and more about control of the money.

Advertisers are still increasing spending in 2026, but they’re structuring budgets to stay flexible amid political, platform, and economic uncertainty. That means lighter upfront commitments, more adjustable programmatic and CTV buying, and sharper demands that media investments connect to measurable outcomes. For local media reps, the winning move is to sell “base + flex” programs with clear optimization rhythms and business-result reporting—not just inventory. For agencies, the edge comes from scenario planning, shorter cycles, and locking in flexibility up front so clients can pivot without blowing up the entire plan.

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This is the glorious time of year when most leaders are engulfed in budgets, planning, meetings, and deadlines. With less than six weeks until 2023, let’s dive into a few things to check off or add to your list. Always Start by Looking Back Data is your friend so take the time to review your performance metrics, leading indicators, pipeline performance, and how accurate your revenue projections were/are.

Comerica reports small businesses are entering 2026 optimistic but selective—confidence is high, yet owners are still managing inflation, tariffs, and policy uncertainty, which makes them cautious about waste and complexity. For local media reps and ad agencies, the opportunity isn’t “bigger budgets by default,” but a receptive window for plans that feel practical, measurable, and easy to execute. The most actionable signal is that capex is back, and those investments (new equipment, locations, service lines, hiring) often trigger immediate local-market marketing needs for awareness, leads, and foot traffic. With rate cuts improving sentiment for many owners, the winning pitch frames advertising as a controlled investment—a simple 90-day system that protects cash flow, reduces vendor sprawl, and produces visible progress.