Chapter One pages 11-14/150

I left the Patton Marketing Firm that winter due to my mother’s battle with cancer. I really needed to be closer to her in New Mexico. After all you only have one mother and there were other places to work. I moved out west and was living with the parents temporarily when I decided to start up my own advertising agency. My plan was to do the same things I had done in Michigan with a focus on this relatively new and unknown industry of offshore/online gaming that appeared to have an abundance of disposable cash and not many agencies were familiar with the industry. That made picking up new accounts much easier too. My first account I landed for my own firm was Royal Sports and the marketing director of the time Marty Monroe taught me some very valuable basic lessons on the industry.

1. Gambling is the 2nd oldest profession known to humankind. There is a big piece of pie out there; No sense getting greedy just enjoy your share. He also lightheartedly threw in a joke about pie and the oldest profession known to mankind. Marty has an enjoyable great sense of humor.

2. Be Honest, because the industry was too easy since gaming is a proven form of generating revenue and you are in it for the long haul.

I follow these fundamentals today with regards to advertising for online gaming; although I did have to make some adjustments. Because the industry is so young it has or had a responsibility of being a good citizen, which means pay your bills on time! Obey the rules of advertising and give back to the communities that support you, which means, making donations to various programs/charities in the markets that we targeted to benefit people. Royal was great about charities and sponsored a world champion Little League Team among other programs on the island of Curacao.
Literally a couple of days after landing the account with Royal Sports I got a call from Claude’s assistant Caroline. She requested that I get BOS into about 7 publications that they were having difficulty with. I had a good way with people and out of the seven magazines that had rejected BOS I got agreements with 3 of them to take the advertising. The publications included Men’s Health, Esquire and Departures magazine. One thing about Claude he was a brutal negotiator and paid bottom dollar for every publication that took BOS advertising. He ended up balking at Esquire and Departures because they would not budge off of their rate card discounts.

That left my only remaining agreement with the western regional sales manager Richard Beach, for Men’s Health Magazine. With the verbal approval of Shaun Kelly, the marketing director and Claude’s signature, the Men's Health deal was signed for $85,000 per issue. At the time I had moved permanently back to Los Angeles and was taking full advantage of the media professionals in the city. Men’s Health would not go smooth at all. It was just a bad business decision to run 3 spreads and after the first month when results were not coming in BOS defaulted on the 3rd payment as the 2nd issue had already been printed and paid for. Ironically, the spread in Men's Health cost the same as Sports Illustrated, only difference was the shelf life as readers of both magazines tended to spend the same amount of time per each issue. I also notice Claude lacked understanding of the branding process which was necessary for Men’s Health to succeed for his company. Claude wanted immediate responses like most impatient business owners and Men’s Health was not the right media. Claude really wasn’t too different then most business owners in this respect that they want quick responses but he was different in that he ran a giant company which had grown very fast. For Men’s Health to succeed there needed to be a long term commitment. Personally I was never big on Men’s Health or print for that matter for online gaming but sometimes you just have to appease the man with the money and I had yet to prove myself. My preference for media at the time was radio. Radio was more proactive and better for direct response but the magazines were easier to comprehend for BOS ownership. Part of the deal for getting into the Men’s Health was BOS wanted to fly me down to Costa Rica during August of 2000 so I could familiarize myself with their operations. I ended up volunteering to work in the sales office to get familiar with the operations and my knowledge of electronic media caught Claude’s attention as we would soon revolutionize the focus for BOS from print to electronic media.