Firm niche in direct-response advertising shields Encino agency from industry skid.

Firm niche in direct-response advertising shields Encino agency from industry skid

In baseball, you hit them where they aren't; in entrepreneurship, you set up where they aren't.

The baseball reference is to hitting the ball where the fielders are not playing. The business reference is to entering into a specialty where the competition isn't all that strong. That rather explains the formation andsuccess of Inter/Media Advertising of Encino, local kingpin of direct-response advertising.

Inter/Media is a full service advertising agency replete with subsidiaries in media buying, ad creation and telephone book Yellow Pages, but some 50 percent of its $65 million in billings comes from direct response.

"I can say that is our specialty, service direct-response advertising, we really do not have competitors here," says Sydney Yehlaj( the agency's president, who started out as an assistant office boy at KFWB here in the 1950s.

The local ad agency business in general is suffering a recession that might or might not be psychological, but Inter/Media is hiring and expanding. It may be because its specialty is relatively recession-proof or that direct response is on a roll because it's just being discovered or accorded honor. Or it may be a combination of those and other factors.

There are two kinds of direct-response advertising, product or service. To the general public, any differentiation might seem nit-picking, but not to the advertising business. Product and service, to admen, are night and day.

Product-associated direct advertising, simply, features a product for sale, such as a super machine that cuts vegetables into 16 near and attractive forms for your salad. The product is demonstrated on television and a number is put on the screen to order the magic device for only $26.95 in four small payments.

Service direct-response advertising, currently the fastest growing of the two, is that used by organizations or persons who perform a service -- dentists, lawyers, doctors.

Experience at Inter/Media has shown that product-associated direct advertising is more effective when longer, less frequent commercials are used and service-associated direct advertising is more effective when short, frequent commercials are used.

In television a long commercial is 60 seconds. "Short" means no more than 30 seconds; often they're 15 and 10-second coimarcials.

The star? It's neither the product nor the service nor the person or persons who pitch one or the other. The star is the number.

Results achieved by Inter/Media show that a number and a letter -- such as 374-HELP -- has up to four times the drawing power than a number alone.

Although it's a scramble these days among ad agencies, with large ones bidding for all-sized accounts, the major agencies have ignored the direct-response market, Yallen says. He is not sure why, although he's grateful to have the business.

Robert Yallen, Inter/Media executive vice president (Syd Yallen's son) points out that direct marketing may be relatively igjkred by advertisers because it still has a "late night TV sleazy image." It has a hardsell, high-pitch image, the hawker on the boardwalk, even though in reality it's not like that anymore.

This also is the image of 900-number selling, a close relative to direct response. Truth is, Bob Yallen claims, most of the ads the agency places are for daytime TV, and some are as sedate and soft-sell. And although the 900 number remains suspect as a selling tool, it is rapidly gaining in respectability.

Marketing by 900 number calls accounts for about 10 percent of the Inter/Media's business. Again, there are two kinds -- the passive system and the interactive. The passive plays a taped message, giving you avarything from financial advice to sports scores over the telephone; the interactive allows the caller to shift to several different menus available and often to talk with a person on the other end of the line.

The business got a bad name with X-rated subjects and with products and services offered that really didn't come through, or were out-and-out fakes. The sleaze now is being cleaned up, claim the Yallens, and the 900 number is developing into a powerful marketing tool, passive and interactive.

But why is such advertising recession-proof? Explains Bob Yallen: "Well, for example, school advertising rises in recessions. People train for new trades. Health care and entertainment (two specialties of Inter/Media) also do well. Motion pictures boomed during the depression of the 1930s."

All these industries are heavy users of direct response advertising.

Inter/Media was started by Syd Yallen in 1974 as a media-buying company. He found clients needed more services, so he expanded to a general ad agency several years later and went into the Yellow Pages specialty in 1988.

"Yellow Pages is nitty-gritty, heavy detail work that most agencies judged wasn't worth it for the money to be made," says the senior Yallen. "It's largely retail and many agencies didn't want to deal in retail at all. But now they fight for it."

With good reason. Since deregulation of American Telephone, Yellow Page advertising has risen to more than $1 billion annually in the nation.

Perhaps, someday soon, agencies will be battling each other for direct-response or the 900 number business. The Yallens hope to be way ahead of the pack in both fields if that happens, and perhaps off into a new area everybody else ignores.