What the heck is RelationRep?

I don’t fully know.

But what I do know is that advertising runs the world. Okay, hyperbole, but it surely does help it spin.

📊 INSERT BIG FACTS

• Market Size: In 2024, global advertising expenditures reached approximately $1.1 trillion, marking a 7.3% increase from 2023. This growth signifies a 50% rise since 2019, with digital advertising being the primary driver.

• Share of Global GDP: With the global GDP estimated at around $114 trillion in 2025, the advertising sector constitutes roughly 1% of the global economy.

1% doesn’t seem that big, but it is.

And if you’re a seller of ads, you are the reason behind this 1%. Sure, it’s the brands and services buying the stuff. But someone has to sell it. And that’s you.

Sure, AI is and will have a HUGE impact on your career. We’ll have future posts about that, but you definitely should be trying to use it every day for both work and personal life.

“CHAT GPT, can you somehow turn on all the alarms at my prospect’s house and remind them to get back to me??”

It’s here and it’s coming. Use it or become irrelevant.

But at the end of the day, or the beginning or middle, your clients are buying from YOU. You’re their “Digital/Programmatic/OOH/Radio/TV” guy. It’s you. And if you’re worth your salt, your client will continue to buy from you when you move. Yeah, they may stop buying your specific channel for one reason or another (hats off to all you AEs at X these past few years. Having the CEO say “F@(^&$ YOU” to your clients probably didn’t help your bookings). But they will continue to at least hear you out on whatever you’re representing next.

They buy you. Corny but true.

And unlike our SaaS brothers and sisters out there, advertising is not a zero-sum game. Once you buy your CRM, you’re good for a few years. With advertising, even if the budget is maxed out, there is always budget for a great idea.

And that’s what we’re selling. Ideas. All of them may not hit. Some will, even when there was no set budget for it.

This industry NEEDS YOU. It needs you to sustain it. It needs you to grow it.

But the trends aren’t looking so hot…

👥 Ad Slingers: Tenure and Trends

• Average Tenure: Sales representatives in the advertising sector have an average tenure of 18 months. This is concerning, as it typically takes about 15 months for new sales reps to reach peak performance, meaning many leave shortly after becoming fully effective.

• Industry Outlook: Employment of advertising sales agents is projected to decline by 7% from 2023 to 2033. Despite this, approximately 10,300 openings are expected each year, primarily due to the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force.

I want to help fix the above two things. And I believe that by elevating the profession, we can do just that.

How do we elevate it?

Two main things, and it can be summed up in “owning your book.”

1. The Ad Seller of the future fully owns their book of business. They have their own CRM system and AI tools that help them stay in contact with their clients, industry intel, and movements.

2. The Ad Seller of the future doesn’t just get paid on their company’s inventory. They act more like an agency, truly having their client’s best interest at heart and being rewarded for making intros to other or better ad solutions for a given business objective.

This is why I created RelationRep.

This business is built on relationships. And you’re a rep. So I just smashed those two words together and the URL was only around $11.

Where does this go from here? I have some ideas. Some big (CRM). Some small (this post). But what I do know is that in order to grow, I need you and you need me and we need each other (yeah, I threw up a little writing that).

If this hits a chord, please join the movement.

Right now it’s just three things:

• Weekly newsletter: This will become a resource. Brand intel and deep dives (bringing back anADomy of an Ad), random posts about sales and this industry, guest posts, interviews. Media I want to watch and read as a seller of ads. That’s the filter.

• Community group: This is NOT Slack. I’m using Geneva for now and it’s a way for us all to meet and discuss things like RFPs coming down the pike, job openings, intro requests, etc.

• LinkedIn page: I just made this to make it look more official, will probably become a meme channel pretty quickly.

That’s all I got for now. Need to go sell some ads!

// Jason