Digital Sales Person of the Year 2018

Your ’Elevator Pitch’

Shinal Patel has worked tirelessly over the past year to evangelise the power of The Times and Sunday Times premium advertising proposition. In less than 12 months she achieved unprecedented success by increasing revenue, diversifying News UK’s client portfolio and building new profitable relationships across Automotive, Retail, Business, Travel and Finance categories, all in very tough market conditions.

She secured 17 new advertisers (highest amongst the Digital Team) including Statoil, Stein IAS, Neff, De’Longhi, Boeing, Selfridges, Moet & Chandon, Universal Pictures and Vauxhall amounting to £587K in new business which accounted for 12% of all Times digital revenue in 2017.

Set The Scene

As well as facing competition for our readership from free to view and emerging social publishers, The Times traditional client base was also being offered new ways of targeting, reaching and measuring premium audiences but at greater scale than the 400k members behind The Times paywall.

Shinal was tasked with:

• Diversifying The Times list of advertisers
• Tangibly demonstrating how advertisers were able to reach a unique engaged, loyal and influential audience beyond the paywall

Tell Us The Story

2017 was pivotal for the digital team and Shinal played a vital role in driving growth for The Times.
She implemented a clear agency sales strategy to grow key category spend by diversifying the advertiser base, increasing content and premium programmatic revenue streams as well increasing overall transaction value from her patch by 25%.

Knowing that data would be key to demonstrating The Times value proposition, she worked alongside the insights team at News UK to identify specific data points to tangibly show this. Armed with this vital information, she first went after the retail sector and secured incremental digital revenue from the LVMH group growing their overall revenue by spend by 274% YoY. She was also able to increase revenue from brands such as Boeing, Statoil and De’Longhi by £130K.

Her digital expertise also allowed her to strategically collaborate and integrate departments from across the business in order to offer the best platform solution for her clients. For example, she worked closely with the Creative Solutions and Client teams and secured large, cross-platform campaigns from clients such as Dell, Siemens and Grundig.

She has also gone above and beyond her remit by selling to customers outside her main targets and secured £20k in print advertising for Universal Pictures and £21k in Unruly video for De’Longhi.

The Results

The Duracell Bunny personified in 2017 Shinal:

• Spearheaded 297 inter agency meetings to drive growth and identify the best platform solution for her clients Exceeded personal sales target by 114%
• Increased MediaCom’s spend by 357% YoY in 10 months
• Increased Universal McCann’s spend by 594% YoY
• Grew Initiative business from £0 to £250k
• Grew LVMH client spend by 274% YoY

Her efforts also saw her win 17 new advertisers amounting to £587k in revenue. She also was the first sales person to:

• Sell Times v-Studio vertical video campaign to Dom Perignon
• Sell Style Play video and native campaigns to Celine, Louis Vuitton and Dior Couture
• Secure the first ever branded content campaigns from Patek Philippe & Universal Pictures
• Secure launch partners for V-Studio and Style play – News UK’s new product propositions

Universal Pictures - Mary Magdalene