If you’re considering dipping your toe into television advertising in your local market you’re probably going to check out cable. When you talk to the sales person beware of “packages”.

I sold local cable television advertising for ten years and have been buying it for six years as the owner of Frink Inc. Advertising.  I’m a cable television advertising advocate. With that being said I can tell you that the primary motivation for the local cable operator to sell packages is to unload inventory for which there is little demand.

The packages are designed to entice you with an incredibly low spot rate. The usual format is to group various networks together and offer them on a Monday-Sunday 6am – 12midnight basis.  Recently I saw a cable package billed as targeting men. It grouped nine networks together including National Geographic, Sci-Fi, FX, and TNT among others and offered them on M-F 6am-6pm basis. M-F 6am-6pm which means no spots will run in primetime and no spots will run on the weekend when most of daytime viewing occurs.  The spots were $3 each. Wow what a deal right?  Not really. How many men watch the Sci-Fi channel or FX at 9 am on Tuesday morning?

Sports packages are also popular.  College football and basketball packages that might include hundreds of games are merchandised with average spot rates of $50 to $75. These are usually bad deals because they include dozens of Division II games that only girlfriends and relatives will be watching.

You don’t need to buy a package to make a good cable buy. You do need to be able to; 1. Clearly define your target prospects, 2. Identify what they’re watching and 3. Know the cable vendor’s pressure points. 

With a little thought you can probably handle #1 on your own. A good cable sales representative might be able to help you with #2.  On #3 a good sales rep. won’t help.

Your best bet is to seek the advice of an independent advertising professional. A good one will save you time and money.

Frink you got to have a gimmick”. That was the advice given to me on how to get women from Andy, one of my college roommates. I didn’t realize it at the time and though I was in my third year in college as an advertising major it was my first lesson in branding and positioning. Andy’s gimmick was to take on the persona of the “charming hick”. Andy was a very bright guy from Beaumont, Texas.  He was well read. There were few topics he couldn’t converse with you on. He graduated from The University of Texas with an accounting degree and a 3.5 grade point average. Yet he methodically and consistently over a period of four years cultivated his image as a hick.

Why you might ask, would anybody intentionally portray themselves as a “hick”. Andy’s motivation was what we call in the advertising and marketing industry, “branding” and “positioning”.  Andy and I were members of a large fraternity at The University of Texas in the mid 1970s.  The fraternity from a social stand point was our world, a small provincial, pretentious, chauvinistic world. Many of our “brothers” were handsome guys; we called them “face jocks”.  Even more of them seemed to be from wealthy families.  They dressed well and they drove very nice late model automobiles.  Being a face jock, dressing well and driving nice cars had its’ advantages in the Greek world at The University of Texas in the mid 1970s.  The most important advantage of course was with the women.  If you had these characteristics you were guaranteed opportunities to date some beautiful sorority girls who might also be from a wealthy family.  Yeah the Greek world at The University had some shallow aspects to it.

Andy wasn’t a face jock. He didn’t drive a nice late model car and he didn’t appear to be from a wealthy family. Since he couldn’t compete in those areas Andy brilliantly identified a strength he could exploit when it came to competing against wealthy “face jocks” for women.  Andy developed a “charming hick” persona.  Think Andy Griffith as the small town North Carolina sheriff in The Andy Griffith Show.  Andy was good at it.  He worked construction during summers in east Texas and enjoyed using the region’s accent and some of its’ interesting phraseology that he had picked up.  His positioning strategy worked.  Andy dated more than his share of pretty sorority girls and eventually became engaged to one during his senior year.

 I wasn’t rich or particularly handsome and I had no gimmick as Andy perceptively pointed out.  Despite Andy’s advice I didn’t identify a positioning strategy that I could successfully execute.  Therefore my love life was some what of a bust juxtaposed to my room mate the “Charming hick”.

What’s your business’ “gimmick” i.e. your position versus your competition?  Have you done what Andy did by identifying and exploiting a market niche for yourself?  Or are you like I was, without a positioning strategy? If your position is; “low prices”, “been in business a long time” or “locally owned and operated” you probably haven’t claimed a unique position in the market place and my advice to you is, “you got to have a gimmick”.

I founded Frink Inc. Advertising in 2002 after eleven years as a highly successful cable television and local affiliate advertising sales rep. During my tenure as a media rep. I established relationships with several clients that went beyond the selling of airtime. I became an advertising consultant to these clients advising them on script writing, ad production, the print media and airtime buys on television and radio stations that I didn't represent. Clients turned to me for expertise beyond my product knowledge of cable or the particular station I represented. This happened because I stood out from most of the sales people they dealt with day in day out. I stood out because I had an in depth knowledge of my product that helped them run their businesses. I was easy to get a hold of, I returned phone calls promptly and I did what I said I was going to do. In addition I was a seasoned business man. I had been the owner of a small chain of convenience stores for eight years before I became a media sales rep. This experience gave me business depth and made it easy for me to relate to my clients who were small business owners. Providing stand out customer service fostered professionally satisfying close relationships with my clients as well as record sales. I was the highest billing sales person by a wide margin at Time Warner 6 out of the last 7 years I was there. You would think that this would have pleased my management and it generally did with one caveat, they felt that I was a bit too focused on the needs of my clients and not focused enough on selling all the junk we had to sell whether it benefited my clients or not. One of my last performance reviews states that, "Bill's sales record is outstanding but he is little bit too client focused". Go figure. Since my clients were slightly more pleased with my performance than management it was a natural and logical if not an all together smooth transition from media sales to opening an advertising agency. Resurrecting my corporate moniker and my entrepreneurial ambitions in 2002 I founded Frink Inc. Advertising. After five and half years I still have five clients that I carried over from my media sales career. I'm still in sales but now I have a larger product line than I did in media sales. In 2004 I added a full service video production operation and staffed it with the best producer in town whom I had worked with for ten years at Time Warner. Norm Wright brought with him several of his production clients that he had bonded with over seventeen years of producing at Time Warner. We were able to do this and add Time Warner to our list production clients. We have an exclusive arrangement with Time Warner Austin for their over flow of television commercial production work. We also produce videos for their public affairs department. Corporate video is a growing part of our business. We've produced retail training, marketing and demonstration videos. About a year ago a company in the multi-family real estate management business asked me to write a white paper about the evolution of the local cable television advertising sales industry. This company is going to start providing cable television or IPTV service to their clients and thus they will enter cable television advertising business. I was a good writer when I was in high school and college and I have a decent portfolio of television and radio scripts but I had never a written a white paper. Other than an occasional love letter it had been years since I had written anything longer than a creative brief introducing scripts for television and radio commercial scripts. I was excited by the challenge. It was a little difficult to get started but I was an expert on the subject and soon everything started to flow. It was an exhilarating experience and the final product was received well. I yearned for more professional long form writing projects. I settled for writing a Longhorn football blog during the 2007 football season. It too was received well. Now what? An advertising blog! Introducing The Frink Tanks. I hope you like it