Tag Archives: Lipari, Fran

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.

1983-1985 TSI: GrandAd: The Datamaster Clients

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A good fit for several agencies. Continue reading →

IBM’s Datamaster was widely disparaged in the technical press. PC’s and Macs were the rage. The reasons for this evaluation were persuasive, if a little superficial.

  • A Datamaster cost a lot more than a PC.
  • The Datamaster’s programs only ran on Datamasters. Many hardware vendors were offering PC’s that were “IBM compatible”.
  • The Datamaster could in no way run PC programs.
  • The Datamaster’s peripherals—displays, printers, keyboards, and hard drive—were very limited.
  • The Datamaster’s specs were inferior. The processor looked very slow.

Nevertheless, the Datamaster was a very good computer for TSI. It was extremely easy to program, and it was very good at the two tasks for which it was designed—data processing and word processing. It was also quite reliable. PC’s crashed all the time. Some of our clients used their Datamaster’s for years without ever making a service call to IBM. Those who did were uniformly satisfied with the attention that they received.

For the ad agency application there was one other overriding advantage. Up to four Datamasters could use the same hard drive. This allowed the media department and the accounting department to have access to the same data. In the early eighties personal computers were totally personal. Reliable networks were many years away.

Yes, the Datamaster was horrible at other tasks such as spreadsheet, and it had absolutely no capacity for graphics. However, most of the people who owned and ran small businesses in the early eighties were interested in addressing business problems. They did not care much about system specs, and the fact that IBM sold and supported the system was of paramount importance to them.

I am almost positive that our third ad agency client was Communication & Design (C&D)1 in Latham, NY, just north of Albany. The principals were Fran (a guy) and Theresa Lipari2. The agency purchased two Datamasters and a hard drive. I am pretty sure that by this time TSI was in IBM’s Business Partner program as a Value-added Remarketer (VAR), and C&D bought the hardware through us. We only needed to make minor adjustments to the software system that we installed at Potter Hazlehurst, Inc. (PHI).

It was a long drive, but unless there was snow on the highway, it was never stressful. Best of all, the sun was never in my eyes.

Nevertheless, I made the drive to Albany quite a few times. There was no avoiding personal involvement at several stages in these installations. The transition from manual ledgers to computerized accounting systems was never trivial. The first few monthly closing processes never went completely smoothly.

For several years I worked very closely with the woman most involved with C&D’s system. She was definitely the bookkeeper. She might have also been the office manager. I found her to be intelligent and very easy to work with. I am therefore embarrassed that I cannot remember her name. I recall clearly, however, that she was a big fan of the New York Giants football team. She had even bought vanity license plates for her car that said “NYGIANTS”.

When she left the agency, she was replaced by a woman who was as tall as I was. I don’t remember her name either, but I think that it was French, maybe Bissonet.

I also dealt with the media director when they implemented the media system. I don’t remember her name either, but she was, I am pretty sure, also a principal in the business. She explained to me about inserts3—the advertising pieces that were stuffed into the middle of a newspaper, usually on Sundays and Thursdays. From a database perspective they had pages like direct mail pieces but schedules (lists of newspapers and dates) like newspaper ads. Since we were already using the same set of files for direct mail and newspaper ads, it was not too difficult to set up ad types for inserts.

I remember meeting with Fran after the whole system had been in place for a while. He told me that the media director had started her own agency, and she had taken some of his best clients with her. I never encountered any business that was as “dog-eat-dog” as the ad agency business.

I generally drove up to C&D early in the morning and back at night. I sometimes stopped for supper at a restaurant in East Greenbush. I generally listened to WAMC, the powerful NPR station in Albany. Once I heard—for the first time—the entire recording of The Phantom of the Opera. On another occasion I listened to Lt. Col. Oliver North defending his actions in the Iran-Contra hearing.

A couple of times I stayed overnight. A Howard Johnson’s hotel was right across the street.

Perhaps our easiest installation ever was at The Edward Owen Co. in Canton, CT. The owner was Ken Owen, who was a few years younger than I was. We had (and still have) similar interests. He majored in the classics at Harvard, which prepared him well both to teach Latin and/or Greek somewhere or to take over the family business after he graduated. He chose the road more taken.

The company was named after Ken’s grandfather, who had built the business up to be one of the most successful in the Hartford area. Ken’s father had apparently undone most of that. When we worked with the company Ken had only a part-time assistant and a resident artist who was not on the payroll. His father, who taught Latin at Avon Old Farms school, stopped by occasionally.

It was an easy installation because Ken was the ideal client. He understood and could explain exactly what he wanted. Furthermore, no one else had their fingers in the pie.

Ken and I initiated a lifelong habit of greeting each other on Exelauno Day4 (March 4). Sue and I also went to visit him, his wife Patti, and their two sons a few times. He drove to our house for one of our Murder Mystery parties, too.

This requirement alone would leave me out.

Ken was a serious runner. The advertising agencies in New England sponsored a mile run for CEO’s every year. He easily won whenever he entered. I often asked him for advice about running, although what I did he would probably call strolling. I was never close to being in his league.

I don’t remember the name of the artist who worked there, but I vividly recall the nice drawing that he executed for us. It showed three people in choir robes singing from three different hymnbooks labeled “accounting hymns”, “media hymns”, and “production hymns”.

We also asked Ken to help us with the one and only advertisement that we ran. It appeared in one issue of AdWeek New England. That experience is described here.

We created one new module for Yellow Pages advertising. The unique thing about Yellow Page advertising was that the agency only ordered it once. It then ran year after year until someone canceled or revised the ad. Ken’s father said that it was the best kind of advertising. All you had to do was open the envelope every year and endorse the check. Unfortunately, none of our other clients ever had a used for this module.

Ken’s business near Route 44 was next to a strip mall that contained a Marshall’s. We did not have stores like that east of the river. I often popped in there to see if they had anything cheap in my size.

Ken’s company is still in business. He moved the company to Sheffield, MA, which is south of Great Barrington. He also changed the focus of his efforts to, of all things, custom programming. The company’s web page is here.

As you can probably guess, Group 4 Design, which had offices on Route 10 in Avon, CT, was not a full-service advertising agency. They did not place any ads, and, in order to avoid charging sales tax, they were careful not to deliver anything tangible to their clients.

In other ways, however, they were like an ad agency. They billed the time spent by employees, and they could use the job costing and accounting functions designed for ad agencies. So, we treated them as an advertising agency without a media department, an approach that seemed to work well.

This was Group 4’s headquarters. Google says it was permanently closed, but Frank still lists himself as president..

I am not sure who the other three members of the “Group” were, but when we worked with them the firm was definitely run by Frank von Holhausen5. Once the system was up and running he seemed satisfied with it. The only thing that I can remember about him is that he was in a dispute with the state because his company had not been charging its clients tax on Group 4’s services. At the time the state had a tax on services6 and the only services exempted from the tax were legal and accounting. Frank complained, “They want to tax my brain!”

I worked almost exclusively with Joan Healey, the bookkeeper. She had difficulty with the first few monthly closings, but after she understood the process, Group 4 was a good reference account for TSI.

Adams, Rickard & Mason (ARM), an ad agency in Glastonbury, CT, used the GrandAd system until it merged with another agency in 1988. I never met any of the principals. In the negotiations and the initial installation we dealt with the head of finance for the agency. His name was Dave Garaventa7.

We met at the house in Rockville. Debbie Priola and Denise Bessette were in the office working. Sue and David and I sat around a table in the office. We were going over some reports that he wanted included in the system. Four of the five people in the room were smoking. After about an hour of this I felt horrible. I excused myself and walked outside to get some air.

At the time of the installation ARM was in the process of moving into offices that someone at the agency had designed specifically for them. Visually, they were quite striking. However, half of the building was on stilts. the area beneath it was used for parking, However, in the winter that half of the building was always cold because it was surrounded by cold air on all sides.

All of the employees were forced asked to take a pencil-and-paper multiple-choice test to determine whether they were “left-brained” or “right-brained”. The results were interpreted as a multi-colored strip that was displayed beneath names on offices and desks. I am not sure why the agency did this. I researched hemispheric specialization pretty thoroughly in college. This was bogus.

Our software maintenance contract with ARM was the same one that we had with every other client. We offered free telephone support during business hours, which were clearly explicated in the contract.

My fingertips were on the keyboard, not each other.

Weekends were sacred to me. I had virtually no time available during the week to program. I spent those days driving around to clients and prospects, training Denise, setting up her work, and writing proposals and documentation. On Saturdays and Sundays I worked on the custom programming that I had promised our clients from before dawn until I got very sleepy in the evening.

On one Sunday morning the phone rang. It was Dot Kurachik (or something like that), the bookkeeper at ARM. I worked with her for almost an hour and solved her problem. I sent her a bill for $75, our minimum charge at the time. She refused to pay. I talked with her boss, and he overruled her.

Cronin and Company of Glastonbury, CT, might be TSI’s only Datamaster client that is still functioning as an ad agency in 2021. Our primary contact was Mike Wheeler, who was, I think, the head of finance. He seemed very level-headed. We did only a little custom work for them.

Cronin did not have this door when I spent time there.

The main computer operator’s name was Jeannine Bradley8. After using the GrandAd system for several years, Cronin was persuaded to convert to a different software system. We did not get an opportunity to bid on this. We would have proposed a System/36 or an AS/400.

Jeannine called our office about something (I don’t remember what), and she confided to me that they now thought that they had made a mistake when they bought the new system.

I don’t recall any strange or funny stories about this account. The employees always seemed straightforward and competent to me.

The strangest of all of our installations was at Donahue, Inc., an ad agency in Hartford. We did not sell them a Datamaster. They somehow obtained one that had been purchased by Harland-Tine back in the early eighties. The installation at Donahue began in the first months of 1988. It was TSI’s last Datamaster installation.

You could say that Donahue Inc. was “old school”.

Donahue’s building did not look like it housed an ad agency or any other business. It looked like an old school, which is close to what it was originally used for. It was the custom-built home of the Cathedral Lyceum9. That designation was clearly etched above the front door.

I don’t remember ever talking to a principal there about what they hoped to accomplish with their system. Their goals, which were explained to me by a woman whom I hardly saw again, were relatively modest. They just wanted to automate their billing and accounting.

The only person whom I dealt with after that was the bookkeeper, a young inexperienced guy. He knew nothing about computers and very little about either bookkeeping or advertising. He and the Datamaster and the printer shared office space with the agency’s kitchen, which was on the ground floor of the building. The first few monthly closings were a nightmare.

Did I mention that there was no heat in the kitchen? The two of us sat there wearing overcoats and stocking caps. The person not operating the Datamaster wore gloves. People wandered in, got a cup of coffee, and quickly retreated to the area of the building that was heated.

The young man who did their books and operated their Datamaster confided to me that his goal in life was to become a real estate agent for Century 21. He really thought that their trademark blazers were cool.

Darby O’Brien.

Darby O’Brien Advertising (DOB), a full-service ad agency in downtown Springfield, MA, was not actually a Datamaster client, but I included them is this blog because they used the version of the software designed for the Datamaster. Darby10 insisted on using a Wang PC sold by one of his clients, a store that sold and repaired computers. We grumbled about this plan, but supporting their system this way turned out not to be too difficult for us.

A Wang PC.

They needed to purchase a license to use Work Station Basic11, a DOS-based product that supported all of the syntax used by the Datamaster’s version of BASIC. We also charged them for converting our code to a format that the Wang12 PC could use, but that took less than a day. In the end they probably paid more for a demonstrably inferior product. Unlike the Datamaster, a Wang PC could run other applications such as Lotus 123, but to my knowledge it was never used for that purpose.

When we installed the system, the accounting person was Caroline Harrington. For some reason Caroline resigned her position at DOB and came to work for us. Sue must have arranged this. I certainly did not recruit her.

In the eighties DOB’s offices were behind one of these two doors.

The agency’s building was in a rough part of town. It was less than a block away from the stripper bars. I was still relatively bullet-proof then, but I did not like to be there after dark. We did go there at night once, and we had a great time. The agency threw a party, and they invited all of their clients and vendors.

A very good live band played oldies from the fifties and sixties. The highlight of the evening was when they played the Isley Brothers’ hit, “Shout!” Everybody (except for me and my monkey) knew when to get down low, when to raise up, and when to shout. I hate rituals, but this one sort of made me wish that I had gone to at least one mixer.

The restrooms in the DOB offices were easy to find. The door to the men’s room was decorated with a three-foot high picture of Elvis Presley. The ladies’ room had a similarly sized portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

1. The ampersand was important. It was emphasized strongly in the agency’s logo.

2 .The Liparis’ last name was pronounced Lih PAIR ee, unlike the island just off the coast of Sicily, which is pronounced LEE pah ree with a trilled r. I am pretty sure that Fran and Theresa reside in Plymouth, MA, in 2021.

3. I later toyed with the idea of using inserts as the basis of a new business for TSI. Details are here.

4. Ken told me that “Exelauno!” is the Greek word for “March forth!” Google translate does not agree. I sold my ancient Greek dictionary at the end of my senior year. So, I can’t look it up. The origin of this custom is documented here.

5. Frank von Holhausen is now listed as the founder and Chief Design Officer at Forge Design & Engineering of Oxford, CT. His LinkedIn page is here.

6. Frank’s lament and the difficulty that TSI confronted in determining how much of what we did was service and how much was product acted as a key plot element in the short story that I wrote in 1988. The details are here.

7. Dave Garaventa died a year or so after we installed the system.

8. In 2021 Jeannine Bradley lives in Cromwell. She might still work at Cronin. She was promoted to accounting manager in 2012.

9. The Lyceum was built in 1895. You can read about it here.

10. Darby’s agency is still in business, but it has changed locations a few times. The latest headquarters is in South Hadley. He tells his own story here. I can’t believe he let them photograph him wearing a Yankees hat in Massachusetts.

11. Workstation Basic is described in some detail here.

12. Wang filed for bankruptcy protection in 1996.