Daniel M. Ambrose


About Daniel M. Ambrose

Ambrose, launched ambro.com, corp. in 1994 to provide sophisticated strategy consulting and advertising sales training to advertising-driven media clients in the U.S. and abroad. Starting with the founding of About.com and iVillage in 1995, ambro.com has worked with hundreds of clients to help accelerate advertising revenue growth.

How To Stay Ahead of Your Customers

If you are not providing leadership to your customers you will be relegated to the commodity media file. You’ll be the company that occasionally receives business when it suits your customer-base. On the other hand, as a leadership media company you’ll drive new business, win greater market share, and expand your market.

Use leadership to get ahead of your customers

A Sales Call Is Like a Blind Date: Are You Talking Too Much?

What do dates and sales calls have in common? You probably need to win another meeting or date to accomplish your goal. You are, in fact, building a relationship. You know good and well that talking about yourself too much on a date is a way to make sure it’s […]


Unlike Print: Digital Ads are Out-of-Sight, Out-of-Mind 1

I have been advising and training digital publishers on how to sell advertising for 20 years.  After a career in selling print advertising, first I predominately worked with digital publishers.  Then, after the internet advertising industry was off and running, I was most often hired by print-advertising, sales-driven publishers to […]


Young People Like Print, Too 1

Last week I wrote about how digital-direct-marketers are using print to drive more and better sales results.  I have asserted for some time in my Hybrid Media sales training that consumers use print for different reasons than they do digital media, and that the two together are more powerful than […]


Cold-Calling is an Investment: Do it Right

Your cold-calling is adding extra targeted, customized, frequency to the rest of your ad-sales-marketing plan that helps you win new business. Your calls are targeted to the prospects with the greatest need or potential for business volume. Think of your cold-calling plan as a personal brand-building process.


Keeping Up With Your Customers: Ad-Sales for Content Marketing

“One of the biggest problems of publishers and advertising sales staffs today is falling behind the customer.” Leading advertisers are moving as fast as they can to keep up with the changing information habits of their customers. But most publishers are more focused on selling what they have, the way it’s been sold in the past, than thinking about how to sell new services or sell advertising in new ways. So publishers and advertising sales executives are falling behind the perceived needs of their customers, the advertisers.


Digital Direct Marketers Agree, Can’t Live Well Without Print 1

In today’s crowded media market, the core value of print is in the inspiration. For digital, it is in the execution. The WSJ reported “Boden, the U.K.-based clothing retailer, ships millions of catalogs around the world each year. Shoppers spend up to 15 to 20 minutes with the catalog, says Shanie Cunningham, head of U.S. marketing, compared with an average of just eight seconds for a Boden email and about five minutes with the Boden iPad app.”


Have a Hypothesis, Be Humble, Ask Questions like Columbo

The solution to overcoming fear of being wrong, is avoiding the need to be right. Journalists do this all the time by asking first the obvious, then the un-obvious question. Columbo, my favorite disheveled TV detective, would pose two conflicting sets of facts and ask questions trying to resolve them.


Publishing Strategy: Use Social Media, Invest in Content. 1

High quality content, and more and more of it, is your social media strategy. People share content, and comment on content via social media. No content, no sharing. Build your content first. Readers will share on their social media of choice. When Facebook declines they’ll share it on the next platform, be it Snapchat or Instagram or one we haven’t heard of yet.


Discuss the Path to Purchase When You Sell Advertising

Smart advertising sales managers know that they can’t skip selling to the ad agencies and media buying services, but they must never forget where the power is; at the client. And getting client appointments is harder and more valuable than ever.

What gets the attention of clients? Certainly it’s not your circulation or your demographics. That is what they pay agencies to put in to spreadsheets. In order to be successful working at the highest level of advertising media decision making, at the client, you need to be adding value by contributing to their understanding of how customers make purchase decisions to buy their products. If you bring value to keeping up with the changing habits of buyers you will always be welcome in the executive suites of your advertising media customers.

It is the Path to Purchase that is intriguing to customers. It is not simple, rather it is nuanced. It is not static, but rather is changing with the changing media consumption patterns of consumers and business buyers.