Most people think of advertising as a national business. The Sales and Marketing team of the ProSiebenSat.1 Group is proving them wrong. Team leader Andrea Malgara discusses the joys and trials of building a European sales network.

TV advertising is by far the greatest source of income for the ProSiebenSat.1 Group. The company generates a good 80 percent of its € 2.7 billion in revenues from TV spots. Yet advertising is mainly a national business and follows different rules in each market. So how does the Group plan to benefit from its new international structure? Is it even possible to sell airtime simultaneously for multiple countries?

The Sales and Marketing team thinks so. The 60-member team came together in the fall of 2007 to “Europe-ize” the airtime marketing practices of the ProSiebenSat.1 Group as much as possible. The globalization trend is providing new momentum: International corporations increasingly project their marketing efforts onto the inter national stage.

Andrea Malgara, Managing Director of Marketing for German marketing subsidiary SevenOne Media and head of the integration team, shares a goal with Thomas de Buhr, Senior Sales Director International: to build a European sales network and establish a standard range of ad formats in all of the Group’s 13 countries. To do this, the team took a close look at existing promotional

offers, sales structures, procedures and processes and optimized them. They are already building relationships with customers throughout Europe and are negotiating international advertising contracts with a number of multinational companies. The Group also expects to benefit from the exchange of know-how. German stations, for example, are particularly good at special ad formats. Exporting these formats is working well. With ten new special ad formats in seven countries, the integration team has already achieved certain sales synergies.