ICON Helped Network Finely Tune Corporate Travel
The Challenge
Lifetime Television is the leader in women’s television programming. With original movies, series and reality shows, Lifetime has the attention of tens of millions of female viewers every day – a very attractive proposition to many advertisers. But there is another side of running a network that few outside the industry see. The entertainment industry heavily depends on business relationships. And those relationships are built through extensive business travel, client entertainment and the ability and willingness to respond to last-minute business-building and publicity opportunities.
How Icon Uncovered Value
ICON took a unique approach with Lifetime, offering trade credit for portions of its inventory in exchange for business travel and other services that were part of its regular business expenditures. The company’s SVP of Advertising Sales noted, “We can use barter credit throughout the company. We can leverage something that might not have been budgeted or something at the end of the year that increases our profit margin.”
Lifetime is the leader
in women’s television programming.
The Results
The SVP of advertising sales continued, “In a big organization, everything is finely tuned. You have a budget for this, a budget for that, but rarely can you live within those guidelines. Things crop up. With ICON we can extend our corporate travel, or we can do some type of fulfillment – like a golf outing. We entertain clients a fair amount in our business and we have a large sales force to take care of, not just one or two tickets but 20 or 30 or 40. And ICON has a great travel department – we changed our minds about 50 times!”
