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1994-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Saks Fifth Avenue

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TSI had a long but bumpy association with SFA. Continue reading →

Saks Fifth Avenue (SFA) is more than just a store. For decades it has been a chain of high-end department stores throughout North America as well as numerous smaller affiliated stores. In the early nineties its headquarters was in its famous flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The first Saks store was opened in 1867, and for decades the enterprise was owned and operated by the Saks family. However, since 1923 Saks has been owned and controlled by outside organizations except for a two-year period beginning in 1996 when it was a public corporation. Even then 50 percent of the stock was retained by its previous owner, the Bahrain-based firm, Investcorp.

I, of course, was blissfully ignorant of most of this when, in the early nineties, TSI began pitching the AdDept system to the advertising department of Saks. In fact, my presentation to Saks may have been the first one that had a fairly serious chance of succeeding. I don’t remember the demo, but I surely gave one at the IBM office on Madison Avenue. I also definitely visited the office of the Saks’ advertising department, which at that time was on one of the upper floors of the store on Fifth Avenue to collect the requirements for the official proposal.

It did not take me long to realize that SFA was very different from Macy’s. The Senior VP at Saks was a woman, and her secretary was a man. I am embarrassed to report that I don’t remember either of their names. Theirs was an unusual setup in the early nineties. More surprising to me was the fact that around his desk were posted large glossy photographs of shirtless male models.

Saks’ advertising department was responsible for more than just the Fifth Avenue store. There were dozens of full-line stores that bore the SFA logo strategically positioned around the continent in locations with the requisite number of rich people. They also managed the little advertising done for even more Off Fifth outlet stores that sold the merchandise that had not been sold at the SFA stores. They also had responsibility for advertising for the Armani Exchange stores. I never quite understood why.

This was the OTS at 700 N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

For me the most surprising thing about Saks’ approach to advertising was its focus on New York City. Macy’s focus was somewhat similar, but their primary purpose in purchasing AdDept was to be able to hand additional markets. Saks divided their SFA stores into two groups: New York and OTS, which stood for “out-of-town stores.” Their newspaper advertising was heavily focused on the New York Times. They may have used Newsday for the Long Island store, but I don’t think that they used the other tabloids at all.

Saks also advertised very heavily in fashion magazines. In some ways the system could treat magazines as newspapers that only published one issue per month, but in other ways they were quite different. A fair amount of programming was required to handle Saks’ advertising in Vogue and other such periodicals.

Saks signed a contract with TSI in 1994, which was a banner year for the company. I made sure that all of the users of and prospects for the AdDept system knew that Saks was now on our client list by including the news in an issue of Sound Bytes, TSI’s short-lived newsletter.

At Saks Fifth Avenue, the national retailer based in Manhattan, the implementation of the AdDept system is scheduled for May 1. Advertising personnel will be connected to an AS/400 located at the company’s data center in Lawrenceville, NJ, through a Token Ring network. Both Mac and PC users in all areas of the department and the advertising business office will have access to the data. In addition to the wealth of standard features in AdDept, custom programming will provide the department with the ability to produce advertising schedules by store, to track advertising expenses (gross, vendor, and net) by merchandise vendor, and to produce change reports that conform with the way that the department is organized.

Reading this blurb again brought to mind a few unusual aspects concerning the installation.

  • I made at least one trip to Lawrenceville, which is closer to Philadelphia than to Fifth Avenue, probably at the time when the AS/400 was installed in 1994. Almost never did anyone from TSI deal with anyone from that facility, and they had never had a hardware problem. However, several years later we received a very strange phone call from someone there who requested that someone from our office dial into the system over the modem. They said that no one could remember where they had put it; they hoped that the noise produced by the modem—it never answered on the first ring—would lead them to it. Apparently it worked. In 1998 all of Saks’ computers were moved to the Proffitt’s Inc. facility in Jackson, MI. I installed a newer faster machine there.
  • My recollection is that Saks used very little of the custom programming that TSI had coded and implemented at the time of the installation until Tom Caputo arrived eight years later. They mainly used the AdDept system as an easier way to key in expenses for their accounts payable and general ledger systems, which AdDept was designed to feed.
  • The phrase “the way that the department is organized,” brought back memories of the difficulties that I encountered while training at SFA. The ROP (i.e., newspaper ads) manager, in particular, was quite uncooperative in helping me understand how she worked. She evidently considered ROP her own little fiefdom, and suspected that revealing the knowledge of how her area worked might affect her job security. This was by no means the last time that I was faced with this sort of heel-dragging.

I remember a few other details about that initial installation:

SFA on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills.
  • I heard one interesting story related by an employee at Saks. The person at the headquarters who monitored sales by store had been very concerned because the Beverly Hills store in California had in the previous few months posted much lower sales than expected. A call to the store manager revealed a simple explanation: “The princess died.” Evidently a Saudi princess had been purchasing so much so regularly from the store that her untimely demise had dramatically deflated the the store’s total revenues.
  • Once or twice I spent consecutive days in Manhattan during the installation. Saks arranged for me to stay in a luxurious room at the nearby Sheraton. It was by far the nicest place in which I ever stayed for business.
  • I remember that on one occasion SFA had asked for a day of training, for which TSI charged $1,000. I discovered when I arrived in Manhattan that no one who actually used (or had any intention of using) the AdDept system was available to spend time with me. So, for several hours I “trained” three interns. For all of them English was a second language. One was named Oscar; I don’t remember the other names.

In subsequent years I was not a bit happy with the state of the installation at Saks. It made me realize that the success of our installations was largely dependent upon the strength of our liaison. The person needed to have the ability to grasp the intricacies of the system, a personality adaptable to working with both TSI and the users of the system, and the clout (direct or indirect) to deal with problems once they had been identified.

I very much wanted to use Saks as a reference account, but they used so little of the system that I was reluctant to mention them. I was frankly puzzled as to why it seemed so difficult to get anyone outside of the finance area interested in making the system work for them. The person with whom we worked the most was Jeanette Igesias1. She was conscientious enough, but she had neither the authority nor the inclination to involve any of the other areas more fully.

In 1998 the retail world was shocked to learn that Saks Holdings, Inc., the parent company, had been acquired by Proffitt’s Inc.2, a company that a few years earlier consisted of a set of stores in Tennessee that could have all fit easily inside the Saks store on Fifth Avenue. Almost immediately after the acquisition the parent company’s name was changed to Saks Inc.

Shortly thereafter I was in Birmingham, AL, to work with employees of the advertising department for the Parisian3, a chain of department stores that Proffitt’s Inc. had previously acquired. The corporate headquarters was also located in the same building. I happened to encounter the same Senior VP from Saks’ adverting department whom I had met in the early nineties. She was there to meet with people from what was then still called Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG). She knew that I had been frustrated with the pace of the installation at SFA. She even remarked that maybe under the new ownership they could get something done.

At about this time Ava John was hired by Saks. I think that she worked under Jeanette until Jeanette left SFA in 2002. Thereafter Ava was TSI’s principal contact for the part of the system used by the advertising business office, which included recording invoices that were uploaded to the corporate accounts payable system.

In 2008 Ava was arrested and charged with running an embezzlement scheme that netted her and her friends and relatives more than $680,000 over the course of five years. That may seem like a lot, but it was only a little over $10,000 per month, a tiny fraction of what Saks spent on advertising. I discovered a single mistake at another installation that was about as large as this.

At the time I did not hear about any of this, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither did any of TSI’s employees, but the scandal was reported in all three of New York’s major dailies. The Post‘s coverage can be read here. I was unable to discover anything posted on the Internet about the ultimate legal resolution. I also know nothing more about Ava.

In 2001 Tom Caputo, who had been TSI’s primary contact at Lord &Taylor5 for several years, was hired by Saks. He had a number of responsibilities in the advertising department, one of which was to oversee the AdDept installation. Tom’s office was not in the flagship store, but in an office building across the street. I met with him there several times. I cannot remember what projects we did for them, but I remember that Tom seemed frustrated with the situation there, or, more likely with what the world of retail had become in the twenty-first century.

Tom stayed at Saks until 2014, the same year that Denise Bessette and I decided to shut down TSI. I had one further contact with him. He asked me if I knew of any job openings that he would qualify for. I had to reply in the negative. By that time the demand for both people and software that was adept at administering the advertising for large national retailers was negligible. I felt sorry for my many acquaintances who were not able to disassociate themselves from this undertaking as smoothly as we did.

In 2007 Saks was spun off from the other department stores that were part of Saks Inc. The executive who had cobbled together this retail giant, R. Brad Martin, summarily abandoned the leadership of the rest of the stores to someone else and elected to run just SFA. His decision to remove the jewel from the crown was described in this New York Post. article.

In 2013 the company was purchased by the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporate enterprise in North America. The company had already purchased Tom Caputo’s previous employer, Lord & Taylor. One of the last projects that I worked on at TSI was helping with the migration of SFA’s AdDept system to the HBC computers located somewhere in Canada.

There are still many Saks Fifth Avenue stores. HBC opened a huge store in Toronto in 2014 and at least two other stores in Canada. Administration of all of the stores seems to be split between Toronto and New York.

1. Jeanette Iglesias’ LinkedIn page can be found here.

2. Much more about TSI’s relationship with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc. is available here.

3. Details about the Parisian installation of the AdDept system are provided here.

4. You can read about this major boo-boo here.

5. The history of the AdDept installation at Lord & Taylor is documented here.

1993-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Lord & Taylor

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Quasi-independent department store division of the May Co. Continue reading →

TSI enjoyed a good relationship for nearly all of the two decades in which the chain of department stores known as Lord and Taylor used AdDept to manage its advertising department. The headquarters was in one of the upper floors of the flagship stores on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

L&T’s Fifth Avenue store.

I don’t remember the details leading to the contract back in December of 1993. I am not sure that we even did a demo for them at the IBM office. L&T may well have been the first sale for TSI’s marketing director, Doug Pease (introduced here).

We had two very important things going for us. The Senior VP of Advertising at L&T was Howard Adler, who had seen what we could do at Macy’s East, the first AdDept installation (described here). Moreover, L&T was owned by the May Company, and two other May Company divisions had been using AdDept successfully for a few years.

In the April 1994 issue if the newsletter, Sound Bytes, TSI announced the fact that L&T had purchased the AdDept system and an AS/4001 on which to run it:

Lord & Taylor, the third May Co. division to use the AdDept system, is currently in the process of finalizing the specifications for its system. Their system will reside in the company’s Manhattan headquarters. All areas of the department will be connected through a PC network.

Although L&T was definitely owned by the May Company, it did not play by the same rules enforced on the other department store divisions. L&T’s advertising department was not required to produce the same monthly reports that bedeviled the other divisions. Its merchandise was different—I actually saw elbow-length gloves for ladies for sale there. It was much more autonomous in many ways.

The flagship store was more elegant than that of any of the other May Company stores. The nearest men’s room to the advertising department was between elevators on a selling floors. It was by far the most spacious, sparkling, and elegant restroom that I encountered at any office, department store, or anywhere else.

I always took Amtrak to Penn Station when I visited L&T. I usually walked to the store on Fifth Avenue unless the weather was really foul, in which case I stood in line at the taxi stand on 34th St. to get the next available cab.

I entered L&T through the employee entrance, which I think was on 38th St., and descended stairs to the security area. Someone would come down to escort me to the advertising department, which was on one of the upper floors. When I left in the evening, I had to get a note from someone verifying that the laptop in my briefcase belonged to me and had not been purloined from L&T.

An amusing set of incidents in Penn Station that occurred on one of my last visits to L&T in 2007 has been recounted here.

Lord & Taylor used direct mail more than regional department stores. Notes that I compiled in 2000 state:

A very large number of reports were done for them. Unfortunately they are almost all too involved to be used by anyone else. They are the only client that uses AdDept to keep track of bill inserts – the little things included in the monthly statements.

They set up production schedules for direct mail. At one time they used AdDept for estimating direct mail, but they abandoned it. They have job jacket programs for both ROP and direct mail.

L&T also did more magazine advertising than the other divisions. AdDept did not seem to help much in that area.

We developed as part of the original design document an elaborate system for them of managing their magazine advertising (“The Projection Book”) and comparing it with competitors’, but they do not use it.

I think that this was the Greek feast. Norm is at the lower left. The guy sitting between two women with his tie in his shirt is Charles. Behind him is Chris.

I vaguely recall that at the very beginning the liaison between TSI and L&T was Norm Vlahos2. I have only a couple of distinct memories about him. The first is that whoever chose him for that role also assigned him and another fellow to act as “security officers” for the AS/400. Norm thought that they should be issued badges or at least arm bands to designate their authority. I also remember that Norm was responsible for ordering the food for the Greek-themed feast in which most of the department participated during one of my visits.

This is Charles’s old office. From left: Jennifer, Denise, Jennifer’s reflection, Ali’s reflection, Denise’s reflection, Bob’s reflection, my reflection (flash).

The other person whom I remember from those early days was named Charles. I am pretty sure that he was the finance director of the advertising department. Charles had a very unusual office. One of the walls was a gigantic mirror. I am not sure what its function was, but it made me very uneasy when I was required to sit in there to talk with him.

Same room; different feast. Tom is in the foreground to the left. The bald spot belongs to Howard.

I later learned that Charles owned a string of karate (or something similar) studios in New Jersey. Maybe he used the mirror when he practiced his moves.

Charles ordered the food from the 2nd Ave Deli for the luncheon with a Jewish theme that the department held on one of my visits. It was the best deli food that I ever tasted.

Tom had an office.

After the initial period in which the tables and historical data were into AdDept and the users had become somewhat familiar with the system, Tom Caputo3 was assigned primary responsibility for the AdDept installation. This was a big break for TSI because we got to deal with a person who had both the authority and the expertise to make good decisions about prioritizing what the system should be used for. He made our lives much easier because we seldom needed to deal directly with the users. He was good at finding out exactly what they wanted or needed and conveying the information clearly to us. Over the years he sent us a very large number of custom programming requests—so many that he asked us to combine the billing for the $75 quote fees onto one monthly bill. We were happy to do that.

Tom worked with us at L&T until 2001. He then took a job at Saks Fifth Avenue, where we again had the pleasure of working with him.

Chris only had a cubicle.

After a while L&T provided Tom with an assistant, Chris Pease4, who was employed by L&T from 1996 through 2001. We often worked closely with Chris as well.

I have a lot of very vivid memories of Tom and Chris. I remember almost nothing about the innumerable small projects that we discussed. However I distinctly remember one episode. You can see from the photos that nearly all the men in the advertising department wore suits, white shirts, and ties. One morning Tom spilled coffee or something on his shirt. He dispatched Chris down to the men’s wear department to buy a substitute for him. I was pretty impressed.

Somehow, my visits to L&T became associated with big departmental lunches in the advertising department. Trust me; no one was celebrating my presence or the wonderfulness of the code and support that TSI provided. It was just that I showed up every two or three months, and that also was deemed a reasonable interval between departmental lunches.

There was always a theme for the lunch and an employee in charge of the choice of menu and restaurant. In addition to the Greek lunch ordered by Norm and the Jewish one managed by Charles, I seem to remember an Italian pranzo and a Mexican fiesta. There may have been more. I don’t remember too many specifics, but the meals were all both authentic and delicious.

I have no idea who these guys are. Tom asked them if they were hungry and then told them to dig in.

If no departmental lunch was scheduled, Tom nearly always took Chris and me to a restaurant for lunch. We usually walked to a Chinese restaurant near L&T. On one of the last occasions we ate delicious lamb chops at a chop house. This was really the life.

After Tom and Chris departed, the installation entered a holding pattern. TSI’s primary contact for several years was Esther Roman5. I am pretty sure that she was in charge of the financial area of the advertising department. AdDept was just one of the tools that she used in her job.

Jennifer, Denise, and Ali.

Denise Bessette, Bob Wroblewski (who helped TSI with marketing of AxN to newspapers), and I made a trip to Manhattan in 2004 to meet with the newspaper coordinators, Jennifer Hoke6 and Ali Flack7. The purpose of the trip was to show them how TSI’s new Internet product, AxN (described here), could work for them. The ladies were rather enthusiastic about it, and L&T used the product for quite a few years.

In 2005 Federated Department Stores merged with and took over management of the May Company stores. L&T did not fit into Federated’s plans. Seven stores were sold or rebranded as Macy’s. The rest of the stores, including the flagship store and the headquarters in New York City, were sold to NRDC Equity Partners in 2006. In the following years NRDC also negotiated the purchase of Fortunoff, which was a chain of jewelry stores that was somehow linked with a group of stores that sold outdoor furniture. The intent was to use the L&T staff to manage these stores.

NRDC wanted to keep a separate set of books for the Fortunoff stores. L&T therefore asked TSI to create a separate instance of AdDept on the same AS/400. We figured out a way to do this (some tables and even data files needed to be shared) and installed it in late 2007 so that it could be tested for a couple of months and then used live in 2008.

Our main contact at L&T during this period was Esther. I also dealt with Dan Marrero, who worked for her, in 2007 and 2008. My notes for that period also mention someone named Rachel, but I don’t remember her.

The Fortunoff scheme was a fiasco. In February of 2009 Fortunoff declared bankruptcy after a lackluster holiday season during the Great Recession. NRDC tried to sell the chain, but there were no takers. By May of 2009 all of the Fortunoff stores had been shuttered.

HBC started in the fur trade.

Meanwhile, NRDC had purchased the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporation in North America. It decided that the HBC staff could manage the remaining L&T stores from Ontario. The last work that TSI did for L&T was to help with the migration of the programs and data to an AS/400 somewhere in Canada.

This marriage did not work very well either. In 2019 L&T was again sold, this time to Le Tote, a company that rents women’s clothing (!). The flagship store on Fifth Avenue was closed in 2019 along with some of the other stores. The Covid-19 pandemic rendered the recovery of the remaining stores unfeasible. All the remaining stores were closed by the end of 2020.

The Lord and Taylor name remains in 2021, but only as an online retailer. I tried to find out if they still sell those long gloves. There was no search feature on the website, and there was no category that formal gloves would fit in. So, I don’t think so.

Most of my trips to L&T were one-day excursions. I rode an Amtrak train to Penn Station in the morning and caught a northbound train back home in the evening.

The approach to Lincoln Center is breathtaking.

On Thursday, March 6, 2008, however, I stayed overnight at a hotel. When the dates for the trip had been set, I checked to see what was being staged at the Metropolitan Opera that evening. When I discovered that Verdi’s La Traviata, one of my very favorite operas, was on the bill, I resolved to attend. I had seen this opera twice at the Bushnell in Hartford, and I owned a fantastic CD that featured Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland. I had listened to that recording dozens of times.

After work on the 6th I walked the 1.7 miles from L&T (or maybe the nearby hotel) to Lincoln Center. The theater was nearly full. My seat was near the front but way to the left. I had a terrible view of the stage, but the sound in the theater was so good that the awkward viewpoint did not affect my enjoyment much. I adapted.

The building was, of course, extremely impressive both on the inside and the outside. It was hard to believe that such a huge auditorium had such outstanding acoustics.

The curtain rose on the ballroom scene. I expected for my eye to be drawn to Violetta as the life of the party, but I was wrong. Even after she started singing I was slow to identify the shortest and chubbiest woman on the stage as the legendary lady of the camellias. Ruth Ann Swenson was in excellent voice, but it was impossible to suspend disbelief about her being either an irresistible Parisian courtesan or a woman in the last stages of consumption.

The other two leads, Matthew Polenzani and Dwayne Croft, were fine, but for me the real star was Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. I especially enjoyed the last act, which employed the Met’s stage elevators and a staircase to transport the Germonds from Violetta’s parlor to her bedroom. Operas are seldom even slightly realistic, but I don’t see how this approach could be topped.

Swenson & Kaufmann.

I discovered when researching this section of the blog that the first few performances of this opera back in the beginning of the season had featured Renée Fleming. That would have been something to see, but, then again, I probably would not have been able to scare up a ticket on short notice. Furthermore, if I had waited a week, I might have been able to see Jonas Kaufmann as Alfredo. I did not know who he was in 2008, but within a few years he became the most revered tenor in the world.

The 2007-2008 season was the last that Ruth Ann Swenson performed at the Met. Peter Gelb did not offer her any more contracts, although he insisted that it was not because of her weight.

1. A detailed description of the AdDept system design can be found here. Unique features of the AS/400 are described here.

Norm.
Tom.

2. Norm’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

Chris.

3. Tom Caputo’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Chris Pease was not related to Doug Pease, at least not closely. Chris’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Esther’s LinkedIn page is here.

Jennifer.

6. Jennifer Hoke’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. I could not find a LinkedIn page for Ali Flack. However, there are strong indications that she continued to work for L&T after the management of the chain was turned over to HBC.

8. A detailed description of the AxN system can be found here.

1985-1988 TSI: Adventures in Marketing

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Building a better mousetrap was not enough. Continue reading →

When we moved from Michigan to Rockville, Sue and I knew almost nothing about marketing. When the business was closed over three decades later, we knew a lot more. Unfortunately, at least half of what we had learned was probably wrong.

In Detroit Sue had depended on IBM for referrals. When we moved we learned that the branch offices had no specific policy on this. Each salesperson knew a few of the independent software companies. Since no one in the Hartford office knew us, it was folly to depend on IBM in Connecticut.

The first year or so was the only time in the first three decades of the company’s existence that I had time on my hands. I wrote a little system on the 5120 to keep track of leads. I got most of my information from the Yellow Pages in the reference room of the Hartford Public Library.

I definitely remember sending a letter to the area’s jewelry stores. I think that we also sent one to construction companies. I do not remember how we did these exactly. Perhaps I just wrote a program on the 5120 to print letters with data from the lead tracking system. It seems unlikely that we had letterhead and company envelopes with our Rockville address yet.

I think that we got the lead for the Harstans account from the jewelry store mailing. I don’t remember any responses from anything in the construction industry. If we received any inquiries, Sue would have dealt with them.

I found a business card from the Detroit days in our basement.

After we had purchased a Datamaster with a letter-quality printer, we converted the lead tracking system to run on the new machine. We also invested in company letterhead and web-mounted company invoices. Both were Nantucket grey with light blue lettering. The TSI was striped in imitation of IBM’s logo, but we used a sans serif font.

We definitely did several mailings to ad agencies. Potter Hazlehurst responded to the first mailing. Other mailings may have at least produced a few lukewarm leads.

We received two free pieces of publicity. The GrandAd installation at Harland-Tine was featured in Basic Society News. This was described here. The other article, an interview with Dick Keiler, was published a few years later in AdWeek New England. It is described here.

We also bought our only ad ever in the same issue of that magazine. It was a waste of money.

By 1983 we began to get quite a few leads from IBM. We closed many of these deals, but most required significant custom programming and offered virtually no opportunity for additional business. What we wanted to sell were ad agency systems that took advantage of work that we had already done.

We participated in a campaign organized by a marketing manager at IBM to allow its salesmen to promote “IBM Advertising Agency Solutions.” He asked the third-party developers of ad agency software to provide a list of how their software could benefit ad agencies. Someone then took all of these items, assembled and sorted them all into one huge list, and put them into an attractive fold-out piece in which each of these advantages was claimed for “IBM solutions.”

Of course, no system marketed by anyone actually did all of those things, and some of the advantages were incompatible with others. Furthermore, none of the names of the companies that marketed and supported the software were included. The pamphlet only mentioned “IBM solutions” until the very last paragraph, which stated, “When you combine the specialized capabilities of IBM Business Partner applications for advertising with the quality control, product support and service that accompanies IBM systems, you have a comprehensive and powerful solution. One that can meet the needs of your agency today—and continue to serve you and your clients tomorrow.”

I was very upset when they sent the finished product. Set aside the atrocious grammar of the last sentence fragment. Who will possibly use this piece? IBM reps could not (or at least should not) use it because it doesn’t indicate which business partner could address which problem. No ethical business partner could hand it out because the prospect might think that the software company was claiming all of these advantages for its own product. I suppose that if we were allowed to white-out the parts that did not apply to our systems, we might be able to use it, but it would not look too professional.

When I explained that this was false advertising because the “IBM solution” described within did not exist, he was taken aback. He honestly thought that we would all be happy just to be associated with IBM. I admitted that we were. However we were ALWAYS in competitive situations. We could not afford to be associated with erroneous claims like “IBM creative applications help your writers and artists work more efficiently.” Our software did not improve the efficiency of the creative staff one iota, and if we tried to get the writers and artists to trade in their Macs for IBM iron, we would be run out of the office on a rail.

In addition, there were a couple of advantages that were unique to our approach. Of course, I had listed them, and they appeared in the pamphlet. I resented that every other Business Partner was authorized to claim these advantages, if only implicitly, for its own software.

With the help of Ken Owen of the Edward Owen Company we developed some leave-behinds that were at least a little professional looking and much less likely to get us sued. We put the write-ups of various aspects of the system in notebooks that had the company’s name and logo on it. The first batch were blue with white lettering. Subsequently we reversed the color scheme.

When we gave presentations. we put all of the handouts in folder like the one shown at left. The cover was generic enough that we could use it for any of our software products.

Our mailings for the ad agency system included self-addressed prepaid bounce-back cards on which the recipient could indicate the agency’s interest in our product. This certainly increased the quantity of positive responses that we got, but it also meant that we needed to spend more time qualifying the leads.

By 1986 Sue and I were frustrated with our sales efforts. We had been in business for more than five years. We had amassed a reliable set of reference accounts, but we were still struggling just to meet our payroll.

Sue set up some kind of business relationship with a guy named Joe Danko. I think that he was a consultant who had somehow come across our GrandAd product. He wanted to be our representative in southeast New England. Since the proposed arrangement involved no investment on our part, we agreed to it.

Sue corresponded with a former IBM VAR (as we were) named Jim Holland, who had started a business in Colorado helping others selling “turnkey systems”. Sue liked his approach, but he sold his business to a company in Paramus, NJ, called Motivational Marketing1. He convinced us to drive there for a “Motivational Marketing Working Session” in January of 1987.

We drove to the company’s offices and met with, I think, one of the founders of the company, Gary Farber2. We told him that we were having trouble closing deals for our software system for advertising agencies. We thought that we needed to hire a salesman, but we were not sure how to do it. He outlined a plan for us. It seemed pretty costly and did not directly address the need for a salesman, but if we scored even one or two deals, it would be worth it.

Two guys from the marketing company came to our office in Rockville. The older guy was named Irving; the younger one was Nick Pitasi. They told us that the first step in their plan was to contact our clients to get a more objective view of TSI’s strengths and weaknesses. Nick called everyone on our list of clients. He reported back to us that our clients loved us, and they particularly liked the fact that we educated them. This was rather nice to hear, but we already knew that we had very good reference accounts. We had thought that we were not doing a good job of using this information to our advantage.

Since we had said that we needed a “closer”, and since we already had a relationship with Joe Danko, Irving invited him to our office to interview for the job of salesman. Irving conducted the interview in Sue’s office upstairs in Rockville. I sat in. Sue might have attended as well, but she doesn’t remember it.

I was astounded at how awful Joe’s performance was. Without being asked about it, he went on and on about his involvement in lawsuits over his divorce. I would never have considered hiring him to take out the trash.

After the interview Irving told us that he thought that Joe would be OK as our salesman. Perhaps we should have cut our losses at this point. Irving and Nick might be able to help us in some way, but they certainly seemed unwilling or unable to address what we considered our most critical problem.

Their next step was to hire someone to call the presidents of ad agencies. We had a pretty good list in our lead tracking system. By this time Nick was handling our account by himself. He engaged a guy named Paul Schrenker for this purpose. Nick wrote a script for him. I could not believe how many presidents talked with him when he asked for them by name. I would have bet that he would not reach any of them.

The only person who accepted Paul’s call and expressed any interest was Bill Ervin at O’Neal and Prelle in Hartford. I visited them a couple of times, and they eventually agreed to a contract. The story of that installation is here.

One day I observed Nick while he was calling one of the presidents. It was impressive. A secretary answered the phone. Nick said, “Put Bill on, please.” When the secretary asked who was calling, he just said with supreme confidence, “It’s Nick from TSI.” The president picked up the phone, and Nick talked with him. I certainly couldn’t have done this.

Nick dropped by the office a couple of times after that. He had been in the office enough to see how things were run. By then he was familiar with how Sue would miss appointments and how disorganized she was. On one occasion I asked him whether he thought that we could make a go of it. He said that he did not see how. What a depressing moment that was.

Maybe I should have given up at that point, but I had no plan B. I was almost forty years old. I had burned through several occupations already. I did not want to start over.

When I first started to work with Sue I figured that I would do most of the programming, and she would do the rest of the work. After all, she had much more experience in business than I did, and she loved to talk on the telephone. She was certainly much more of a “people person” and less of a tireless coder She could figure out how programs worked and fix them, but I had never seen her write so much as a single program.

That was not the way that things worked out. As the years went by I took on more and more of the responsibilities. By the late eighties she was doing the accounting and the payroll, and that was about all. Even so, she could not keep up with it. The answer was not increased staff. We went through as many administrative employees as Murphy Brown.

We needed help with sales. The marketing consultants were nearly as worthless as all the other consultants that we had dealt with. We needed to hire a salesman. We terminated our agreement with Motivational Marketing in February 1988.

On March 2, 1987 (Sue’s thirty-sixth birthday), we sent out out a newsletter to all of our clients. It was three pages of 10-pitch single-spaced type on 8½x11″ paper. Mostly it dealt with hardware, but there was also half a page of information about changes that we were making to the S/36 version of the GrandAd system.

I located copies of issues numbered 1 through 6. The fifth issue, dated March 29, 1988, reflects the influence of Michael Symolon, our first marketing director. The first page of this issue announces three new ad agency clients. In addition, the first page is printed on GrandAd stationery that Michael ordered rather than on TSI letterhead. A post-it note attached to the copy that I found indicated that I was slightly annoyed that the subsequent pages did not match the cover page in either color or weight.

This issue is really meaty. I think that Michael or Kate Behart must have done most of the work on this issue and the others in this format. Issue #5 contained six pages of text and a copy of an article from the November 30, 1987, issue of ADWEEK about the installation of the GrandAd system at Rossin, Greenberg, Seronick, and Hill.3

I do not remember how many issues of those newsletters we produced. After I purchased and taught myself how to use PageMaker, the name of the newsletter was changed to Sound Bytes from TSI. At first it was 8½x11″, but the later versions were printed on both sides of 8½x14″ paper and folded to be 8½x7″. They also contained two columns per page, different fonts, and graphics. I located only one copy of each of these formats.

The main purpose of most of the subsequent newsletters was to announce new AdDept clients or new modules developed for existing AdDept clients. There may have also been one focused on TSI’s Internet insertion order system, AxN.

1. I think that Motivational Marketing still exists, but it has now evolved into a call center located in Rochelle Park, NJ. Its website is here.

2. Gary Farber’s LinkedIn page is here.

3. Much more about Michael Symolon’s career at TSI can be read here. More about Kate Behart has been posted here. The description of the installation at RGS&G is here.