Holiday Season Brings Bribes...Um Gifts...to Media Department

Working in the media department at an ad agency has its many perks. Free tickets to anything you want. Great seats at any event you can think of. Free lunches and dinners. Great parties. And for what? All for handing millions of dollars over to the media. Oh, it's legit business of course and we do love out Christmas presents but can we stop with the fruit baskets?

I will say I did get a beautiful clock as a gift this year from MNI and the most incredibly delicious coffee cake from Clear Channel Outdoor. Oh, and wine from a local radio station. I'm not complaining but I will say the worst gift a sales person can give to a media person as anything with a logo on it. If anyone thinks that will make a jaded media person think more highly of a media outlet, their thinking is flawed. We buy on the numbers. Nothing more, nothing less. Unless, of course, you give us cruise tickets. Then we'll buy whether or not you are right for the client. Oh, come one, just kidding. All the free stuff we get goes the clients anyway. Sure.

So tanks to all the wonderful media outlets for making our lives in media so much better than the lives of the "suits" in the client service department. Free tickets are so much more fun than those weekly status reports AE's have to do for clients who never read them.