Re: New Client...wants it all

Hi,

I got into the mail order business when I was young and teamed up with a man who owned the remnant space in 13,000 newspapers and magazines. He had signed these contracts to buy all of the unsold ad space back in the 1940s when nobody dreamed what the value would become. His cost for a full page in the New York Times was $4 and $6 for a full page in the National Enquirer. If you paid $50,000 for a page from the Enquirer you would NEVER turn a profit--you might gross $16,000, but if you partnered with me and my partner, we would put up the page and take 50% of the gross of the direct response. The bottom line was that if you wanted to make a profit in print direct response, you did business with my partner--or you could NOT make a profit.

That was my start in mail order where I learn that it was what you paid for ad space that determined if you made a profit.

When I started airing infomercials and spots I realized that what stations and agencies sold spots for was marked up so high that you can't make a profit so I went to the major time bankers. A time bank is a collection of 30 second to 2 minutes spots with a retail value of $5 million--that is the minimum. When you buy a timebank you pay an average of 50 cents per spot on any station in America and at that price you can make a profit with direct response spots--or you can per enquiry a deal with the timebanker--NOT with the station.

With infomercials it is much more interesting. I own a dozen ad agebcies that bid on half hour time in bulk and I apy from $15 to $150 for any half hour on any broadcast station in America or Canada.
Cable is even more interesting but I won't go into it here publicly.

I make my money by buying half hour time and selling it to ad ahencies or buy airing my own infomercials in that or buying syndicating national TV shows using my half hours.

Because a half hour costs so mucjh less than 30 seconds, it is a business with awesome potential.

I wrote a program that repakces media buyers and automatically bids on half hour time to 176,000 sources of half hour time in my database. There are only 1493 high power broadcast stations but the total number of good sources, not including worthless low power sources, is amazing. No human being could call or email or fax 176,000 sources of media and ask for avails--my software determines how much to bid for each half hour using an artificial intelligence module I wrote that assigns probability densities to each avail.

In this way I can get half hours for less than anybody else...

When you buy a half hour from a station or canle network you can air an infomercial, or an entertainment show or ahybrid of an infomercial and entertainment show. A national half hour that airs in all 50 states and reaches 37 million viewers costs me between $1,000 and $8,000 for teh best half hours NATIONALLY. A 30 second spot with that same time slot can be sold, depending upon the time for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars while the half hours costs less than $8,000.

I don't sell time to "clients"... I buy it for myself or sell it to ad agencies... A typical half hour I buy in bidding for $15 to $150 will be sold by an agency I might sell it to to their client for over $500 to $5,000 depending on the agency....

I don't have the patience to deal with clients and my agencies only buy and trade in bulk time packages.

For example, if I syndicate a non-informercial TV series I will paint the side of a truck green and shot it going by--a scene that I will repeat over and over. Then after the TV show or movie is finished--not an infomercial--I can sell out product placement where I insert a logo on the green side of the truck. Product placement is very lucrative....

Bill

Bill SerGio