Tag Archives: Keiler Advertising

2000-2001 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 1

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Designing our flag and running it up the pole to see if anyone salutes. Continue reading →

By the spring of 2000 Denise Bessette and I had pretty well outlined the steps required to implement TSI’s new Internet product and agreed on the name AxN (pronounced “A cross N”). It was a clearinghouse for insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) sent from advertisers (A) to newspapers (N). It also managed communications from both sides and allowed the newspapers to confirm the orders online. The process that Denise and I employed, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.

I should note that neither Denise nor I have a background in marketing. Most of our discussions about this project took place during the period shortly after Doug Pease, or marketing person left TSI. We had not yet replaced him.

The first non-technical question that we faced was how to fund the project. We never really thought about setting aside a pot of money, borrowing from a financial institution, or seeking investors. Instead, all of the coding made use of tools that we already had or were available at minimal cost. We knew that the company would eventually need to spend some money on marketing, but we had no idea how to budget for it in advance.

A critically important aspect was deciding how we would bill for the service. The insertion orders always originated with AdDept programs on the AS/400s used by TSI’s clients. However, for various reasons no more than twenty of them regularly produced insertion orders inside AdDept. We were already charging those companies a monthly fee for TSI’s support of the AS/400’s faxing software. How much more could we charge them? Most of them knew the limitations of faxing, but removing them was not a high priorities for any of them.

In 2022 the Tribune Company owns the Courant. The building that I visited has been abandoned.

On the other hand, the companies that used AdDept ran ads in hundreds of newspapers, and for most of those papers the department stores were by far the biggest purchasers of advertising. It was not unheard of tor some of these companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for ads in a single newspaper. In order to assess the situation better I scheduled appointments with executives at the two major papers that were within easy driving distance, the Hartford Courant and the Springfield Union News & Sunday Republican1.

I explained our proposed approach to an executive at each publication.The lady at the Courant was not very enthusiastic about the idea, but she did say that the paper would consider whatever the customers wanted. She emphasized that the newspapers were already paying third-party services in order to receive the ads electronically.

The guy at the Republican was more engaging. He showed me the process of how his employees laid out an issue of the paper. They did not start by placing the stories in a way that would make the paper more attractive at the newsstand. They began by figuring out where the ads from Filene’s2, the May Company’s department store chain that dominated New England, would run. He said that sometimes they did not receive the ads until minutes before press time—or even later. However, they always held the space for every ad that Filene’s had scheduled.

So, both Denise and I concluded that TSI should bill the newspapers for the service and to offer it to the advertisers as an alternative to faxing at the same price, thereby bringing their net costs to zero. The big questions were how much to bill the newspapers and how to frame it. It did not seem right to bill the large newspapers the same amount as the smaller ones. The pricing had to seem both moderate and equitable.

Denise came up with the idea of five or so tiered billing amounts, where the tiers were determined not by a paper’s circulation but by its published column-inch rate. These rates were available in a publication called Standard Rates and Data to which most advertising agencies in those days subscribed. I had seen the huge books lying around at our agency customers. I asked employees at Keiler Advertising if I could have an obsolete copy. They gladly located a fairly recent one and gave it to me. I discovered that the rates3 for newspaper advertising varied wildly. As I remember it, we decided to set the floor value for the top tier of AxN rates at $150. So, any paper that with a standard rate of $150 or more per column inch would be charged $150 per month. Other papers would be charged proportionately less

This proved to be a rather easy concept to explain to the newspaper. Because the advertiser and the newspaper both benefited, the costs would be split between them. The newspaper rates were proportional to the publicly recognized value of the ads in their paper. Our fee was roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising space. The size of a full-page ad in a broadsheet newspaper was over 120 column inches. TSI’s fee would be a pittance to newspapers, most of which were still thriving financially in the early twenty-first century. If we could present the system as reducing the number of misunderstandings, the cost for the newspaper could easily be justified if even one free make-good were eliminated every few years.

In 2001 I made two trips to locations of AdDept clients to assess the feasibility of AxN for both the advertisers and the newspapers. The first trip was in January of 2001 to Houston, a city with two large AdDept installations, Stage Stores4 and Foley’s5. I gave fairly detailed demonstrations to the buyers of newspaper space at both locations. I showed the system to Stage Stores first. Here are some of my notes from that trip.

The AxN presentation went pretty well. Becky (Newman), the production manager, made a point to tell me that she was very interested in it. They also gave me a lot of suggestions as to what they needed, especially in the inserts area.

After the demo Becky showed me the AdDirect6 website. It is in many ways similar to ours. They list all of their clients. The only retailers are M&F8, L&T9 (who doesn’t use them), Stage, and Office Depot. The coolest thing about the site is that you can determine which fields are displayed as columns (but not the order of the columns). You can also specify up to three sorting fields. Finally, you can specify a filter to limit the list. Stage would like all of these. They would be less useful to others.

Stage pays AdDirect $10,000 per month. They plan to negotiate the charge down.

… Fort Worth(less) Star Telegram invoice for $500K. Foley’s never indicated that they thought that the papers would be reluctant to pay a little for the IO service. They seemed to think that they would do whatever they told them to do.

Foley’s was under the mistaken impression that all of the other divisions were using AdDirect.

The second trip was to Pittsburgh. I demonstrated the system to the advertising department of Kaufmann’s9, the May Company’s division that was based there. I was able to show the newspaper buyers on their own PCs that very little would be different when they began to use the AxN code that had been added to the AdDept system with which they were familiar. It was really just a matter of flipping a switch for each paper. The system did the rest.

I then signed on to TSI’s AS/400 from one of their PC’s and showed them what orders would look like from their perspective. I showed them in the AxN Handbook for Newspaper Users (posted here) what the orders looked like when the rep signed on with the newspaper’s credentials. They were very impressed.

After explaining how we planned to bill the newspapers, I asked Mary Ann Brown how difficult she thought that it would be to get the newspapers to cooperate. She said, “They’ll do whatever we tell them to do.”

I had appointments the next day with Pittsburgh’s two newspapers, the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. At the Trib I met with an IT guy. He found what we were doing very interesting. He verified that all the reps had access to the Internet, and he was quite pleased that our approach did not require him to purchase equipment or reconfigure what he had. The lady who was Kaufmann’s rep at the Post was more stand-offish, but she verified Mary Ann Brown’s assessment of their willingness to cooperate.

My third appointment was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I rented a car and drove to Cleveland for an afternoon meeting with Kaufmann’s rep. I soon discovered that we had a common acquaintance. He had just returned from a trip to Albany. He had met there with Fran Lipari, the owner of Communication & Design10, the agency that handled the Key Bank account. The rep was polite, but he was not a bit enthusiastic about the prospect of paying TSI for handling insertion orders.

I rated my success level at the three newspapers as a win, a loss, and a tie. That was not a great result, but we were still in the ball game. We were just at the stage in which we were ready to roll the product out to the first advertiser when something remarkable happened.

In 2001 TSI received a telephone call from someone at Belk11, a department store chain that was (and still is) based in Charlotte, NC. In the next few months I made many trips to Charlotte to discuss with them the use of the AdDept system. Since Belk already owned several AS/400s, the time between their approval of the AdDept contract with the accompanying design document for proposed enhancements and the beginning of the installation period was much shorter than usual. I remember that at one of those early meetings I was explaining how the AS/400 could automatically fax the insertion orders to the newspapers. Someone asked if it was possible to use the Internet to send the orders.

Guinea pigs love to whistle. Be careful; if you pick one up by its tail, its eyes will fall out.

I swear that I did not plant this question, but if I had thought of it ahead of time, I probably would have. I informed them that TSI had indeed developed just such a product, and we were about to roll it out to our existing customers. After I explained how it worked, Belk eagerly agreed to act as TSI’s guinea pig (sorry; I meant to type “Beta Site”) for AxN. This was such an ideal situation that I could scarcely believe it.

How TSI persuaded nearly all of the users of AdDept and hundreds of newspapers to sign up for AxN is explained in Part 2, which is posted here.

1. The name of the paper was changed to Springfield Republican in 2001.

2. Filene’s used AdDept for accounting functions, but only because the May Company insisted. I was never able to persuade the newspaper manager to abandon the elaborate set of spreadsheets that he had developed even though it did not produce insertion orders. The painful story of my attempts to get them to use more of the system have been chronicled here.

3. Most department stores negotiated much lower rates than the published ones. They often had complicated agreements about volume discounts.

4. The “standard rate” was the “open” rate for a black & white ROP ad in a daily edition. It did not include any discounts or premiums. I located a web page that actually included a page in one of the 2005 editions of Standard Rates and Data. It showed the complete rate card for the St. Petersburg Times, which happened to subscribe to AxN. It is on p.3 of the pdf posted here. SRDS, the company that published the physical book, now allows subscribing advertisers and agencies to view the rates on the Internet.

Becky Newman’s LinkedIn photo.

5. TSI’s long relationship with Stage Stores is recounted here. I do not have vivid memories of Becky Newman. Her LinkedIn page is here.

6. Foley’s was one of the earliest users of AdDept. The details have been posted here.

7. I have only a vague recollection of AdDirect. Apparently it was a way of entering ads for insertion orders online one at a time. The orders could be sent to the newspapers. This might be a reasonable approach for an ad agency, but retailers ran the same ad in many markets. Entering these one at a time would be unduly burdensome. If the $10,000 figure is correct, then the AdDept-AxN combination saved Stage a heck of a lot of money over the years.

8. M&F is Meier & Frank, the smallest department store division of the May Company. It was based in Portland, OR. Details of the AdDept installation at M&F have been posted here.

9. L&T refers to Lord & Taylor, the May Company division based in New York. The relationship between L&T and TSI is described here.

10. Much more has been posted about the AdDept installation at Kaufmann’s here.

11. Communication & Design (always “&”, never “and”) was one of the first ad agencies to purchase the GrandAd system. My adventures in installing and supporting that system are described here.

12. The details of TSI’s long and productive relationship with Belk are posted here.

1986-2005 TSI: Marketing Employees

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TSI’s salesmen. Continue reading →

By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.

The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.

Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.

We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.

The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.

One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.

TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.

What about TSI?

I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.

I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.

Michael.

This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?

We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.

9.5 rounded up.

Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”

I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.

I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.

I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.

We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.

Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.

Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.

I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.

I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.

For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.

Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.

We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.

I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.

The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.

The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.

Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.

Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.

Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.

The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.

The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.

Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.

The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.

Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores1, the mother ship, vetoed it.

This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.

Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.

A grainy photo of Doug in an airport.

Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.

At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.

Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.

Susan Sikorski

In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.

A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:

Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.

And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.

Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..

Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House3, the largest retailer on the islands.

Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.

We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.

Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.

The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.

In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.

Somebody else’s photo.

I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.

Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.

But, hey, we got the account.

I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.

Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.

Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.4 By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.

After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.

Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.

It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.

Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.

Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on AxN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.

Bob in Denise’s office.

Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.

I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use AxN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use AxN.

Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use AxN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.

I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!

Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.

1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.

2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.

3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.

4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.

1985-1988 TSI: GrandAd: The System/36 Conversion

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TSI’s first big conversion. Continue reading →

A fairly detailed description of the design of the GrandAd System can be found here. More information about IBM’s System/36 (S/36) is posted here.

The purchase of the GrandAd software system in early 1985 by Keiler Advertising (KA) was definitely a milestone for TSI. The agency was one of the two largest in the Hartford area, and its founder and president, Dick Keiler1, was highly respected in the local advertising community.

Although I had recommended to Sandy Procko3, KA’s finance manager and our liaison on the installation, that they buy two Datamasters and a hard drive, IBM had talked her into ordering the recently announced S/36 model 5362. They made the right decision.2 The Datamaster was on its way out, and the S/36 gave them better peripherals and room for growth. It also had many more subtle advantages.

Her decision was a great break for us. We would have needed to convert the system anyway. The sooner that we got started on it the better.

The only problem was that no one at TSI had ever worked on a System/36. We knew that the system had a BASIC interpreter, but we were uncertain about the compatibility of the two versions. IBM provided KA with a huge stack of documentation. I read the BASIC manual thoroughly and was relieved to find that it was very similar to what we were accustomed to. I read enough of the other manuals to get an idea about how to set up their system.

I also had to write the file definitions for each file. We had versions of these created in the Datamaster’s word processing program, but on the S/36 it was important that they be stored as Data Definition Specifications (DDS). The final preliminary step was to write a procedure for creating all of the empty data files from the DDS.

IBM’s office had a 5360, the “washer-dryer” model.

IBM allowed us to work on the S/36 in its downtown Hartford office before KA’s system was delivered. I saved our programs onto 8″ disks. I created a library for them on IBM’s 5360. Then I restored them as text files. I edited them to conform with the S/36 syntax and changed the names of all of the files to use the dot format that SSP required. I then tried to load them in the interpreter. If any lines were rejected, I fixed them and kept trying until the program loaded. Then I went on to the next program, of which there were several hundred.

When I was done with the programs and procedures, I saved the library onto diskettes, brought the diskettes to KA, and restored them. Then I executed the procedures to create all of the files. It never occurred to us that there might some day be a way of populating the data files from files that they had stored on their PC’s. I think that it was possible to save the specs table, which was a fixed-record-length file.

For nearly all of its forty-two years of its existence KA was located in a large house in Farmington, CT. It is portrayed in the photo at the right. During the period in which I was regularly vising the agency, the trees and the bushes were much smaller, and they were surrounded by wood chips. Sandy called Dick “the mulch king” of Farmington.

From the beginning, or shortly thereafter, Sandy was assisted by a younger woman named Shelly. I don’t remember her last name

Getting the code to work on the S/36 caused us fewer problems than one might imagine. By this time we understood how IBM thought about things. The fact that all of our programs followed strict procedures also made it easier to adjust to the differences. I don’t remember encountering any problems that necessitated consulting IBM or anyone else.

Here are my most vivid recollections of the installation.

KA’s 5224 printer was much faster than anything available on a Datamaster.
  • KA not only had a kitchen. It had a chef who prepared meals for clients and prospects and a dining room as well. I was never invited to one of these occasions.
  • The parking lot at KA, which was in the back of the house, had a few narrow grass covered areas with skinny trees in them. I parked my Celica to the left of one of them once. When I exited I turned the wheel too soon. The mirror on the right side of the car got caught on the tree and broke off. Thenceforward there was no mirror on the Celica’s right side. Changing lanes to the right required extreme caution.
  • The first few monthly closings at KA were, as always, difficult. Query/36 sometimes helped the reconciliation process. Nevertheless, on one occasion we had a discrepancy of ten cents in the accounts payable account. Sandy told me not to worry about it, but we had the tools to find it, and so I persisted. I eventually discovered that no vendor was off by a dime. Instead, three invoices were off; all three had discrepancies of more than $100, but they almost perfectly balanced one another.
  • Sandy taught me that if a discrepancy was divisible by nine, it was probably a transposition error.
  • On one occasion guys from the Australian national swimming team were in the office for some reason. Sandy and most of the other female staff members thought that they were very hot.
  • Sandy liked the system’s reports a lot. I am pretty sure that she asked for a couple of revisions, but I do not remember the details. I do remember that, despite the fact that we spent a lot of time making sure that the results of the cost accounting system agreed with the cost accounting system, she never showed any client profitability reports to Dick. She said that that would open a can of worms.
  • I went to KA once during the period in which I was weak from cat scratch fever (as described here). It happened to be on the day that KA was moving its accounting department from the ground floor to the second floor. I carried a printer or something, but the effort totally exhausted me.
  • At some point in 1988, I think, Sandy fell out of Dick’s favor. She was reassigned to take charge of the scheduling of production jobs, a clear demotion. I never learned why all of this happened.
  • Dick hired a woman with experience from a New York agency to replace Sandy. I tried to explain to her why the system’s method of calculating work in process (WIP) was superior to the method advocated by the AAAA, but I don’t think that she bought it.
  • The last time that I went to KA Shelly was in charge of the finance department, and the New Yorker was gone. On that occasion Michael Symolon, our salesman at the time, accompanied me. Evidently he had gone on a date with Shelly once and was embarrassed about it. He stayed in the background. That was the only time that I ever remember him being shy.

When the system had been working successfully for a few months, Dick Keiler arranged to be interviewed by AdWeek New England about our system. It was a very nice article that heaped praise upon our system. It started on the front page, and it continued for several paragraphs in the middle. I had only one minor quibble: THEY NEVER MENTIONED THE NAME OF THE SOFTWARE OR THE COMPANY THAT DEVELOPED IT!!!

TSI had, for the first and only time in its existence purchased an ad. It appeared somewhat close to the article’s continuation page. However the ad was not precisely the same size as the hole that the magazine needed to fill. The way that they floated it in made it look really unprofessional.

I was quite upset about this. I wrote a letter to the editor complaining about both of these things. He called me. He did not apologize. He said that he did not think that it would have been proper to identify TSI. I reminded him that the article clearly identified the hardware vendor as IBM. What was the difference? He repeated that it just did not seem proper. He also thought that our ad looked fine. I hung up on him.

I made lemonade out of this by writing to all the prospects in the northeast about the article, providing “what AdWeek neglected to mention.” It generated a few inquiries.

1. Dick Keiler founded the agency in 1972. He started his retirement process in 1999 and left the company five years later. In 2021 he lives in Tucson Arizona. The agency went out of business in 2015. The last few years are described here.

2. I am pretty sure that in 2021 Sandy Procko resides in Westbrook, CT.

3. I was slow to come to the realization that when trying to sell systems that generated no revenue for the purchaser, it was best to strike when the iron was hot. One of our clients later told me “Christmas only comes once.” The person recommending the purchase always dreaded making a mistake. He/she most feared the prospect of telling the boss a little later that the company needed to purchase more hardware. I always thought that IBM proposed systems that were bigger and more experience than necessary, but they were more experienced at this process than I was.

4. The S/36 operating system, called SSP, used the term “procedure” for a list of commands that were to be executed sequentially. In addition, BASIC used the same term for a sequential list of BASIC commands that could be executed inside the interpreter. On the Datamaster the user was always in the interpreter, and so there was no confusion.