About
I founded Frink Inc. Advertising in 2002 after eleven years as a highly successful cable television and local affiliate advertising sales rep. During my tenure as a media rep. I established relationships with several clients that went beyond the selling of airtime. I became an advertising consultant to these clients advising them on script writing, ad production, the print media and airtime buys on television and radio stations that I didn’t represent. Clients turned to me for expertise beyond my product knowledge of cable or the particular station I represented. This happened because I stood out from most of the sales people they dealt with day in day out. I stood out because I had an in depth knowledge of my product that helped them run their businesses. I was easy to get a hold of, I returned phone calls promptly and I did what I said I was going to do. In addition I was a seasoned business man. I had been the owner of a small chain of convenience stores for eight years before I became a media sales rep. This experience gave me business depth and made it easy for me to relate to my clients who were small business owners.
Providing stand out customer service fostered professionally satisfying close relationships with my clients as well as record sales. I was the highest billing sales person by a wide margin at Time Warner 6 out of the last 7 years I was there. You would think that management would have been quite pleased with me and they were. But that didn’t prevent them from reducing my commission rate by 60% after nine straight years of an annual sales growth rate that averaged over 35%. I was unhappy with the commission reduction and I began considering new career options.
Since my clients were slightly more pleased with my performance than management it was a natural and logical if not an all together smooth transition from media sales to opening an advertising agency. Resurrecting my corporate moniker and my entrepreneurial ambitions in 2002 I founded Frink Inc. Advertising. After five and half years I still have five clients that I carried over from my media sales career. I’m still in sales but now I have a larger product line than I did in media sales. In 2004 I added a full service video production operation and staffed it with the best producer in town whom I had worked with for ten years at Time Warner. Norm Wright brought with him several of his production clients that he had bonded with over seventeen years of producing at Time Warner. We were able to do this and add Time Warner to our list production clients. We have an exclusive arrangement with Time Warner Austin for their over flow of television commercial production work. We also produce videos for their public affairs department. Corporate video is a growing part of our business. We’ve produced retail training, marketing and demonstration videos.
About a year ago a company in the multi-family real estate management business asked me to write a white paper about the evolution of the local cable television advertising sales industry. This company is going to start providing cable television or IPTV service to their clients and thus they will enter cable television advertising business. I was a good writer when I was in high school and college and I have a decent portfolio of television and radio scripts but I had never a written a white paper. Other than an occasional love letter it had been years since I had written anything longer than a creative brief introducing scripts for television and radio commercial scripts. I was excited by the challenge. It was a little difficult to get started but I was an expert on the subject and soon everything started to flow. It was an exhilarating experience and the final product was received well. I yearned for more professional long form writing projects. I settled for writing a Texas Longhorn football blog during the 2007 football season. “Willie Earls so called Longhorn blog” complete with a weekly over/under contest. It too was received well.
Now what? An advertising blog that’s what. Introducing The Frink Tank. I hope you’ll like it.