Our guest for this episode of the podcast was Angelo Fiouris. Angelo works for Altice Media, but people in the New Jersey area probably know the company better as Cablevision. Angelo talks with Tom about the ever-changing industry of advertising on cable television, and sheds some light on some common misconceptions surrounding the business. It was truly a pleasure sitting down with Angelo, and we hope you enjoy the conversation!
MAM 185: Angelo Fiouris of Altice Media Transcript
Tom Mullooly: Welcome back to the Mullooly Asset Management podcast. This is episode number 185 and our guest today is Angelo Fiouris from Altice Media Sales. Angelo?
Angelo Fiouris: Thanks for having me.
Tom Mullooly: Glad you could join us today.
Angelo Fiouris: I’m excited to be here.
Tom Mullooly: Who in the world is Altice Media? You want to talk a little bit about that?
Angelo Fiouris: Sure.
Tom Mullooly: I don’t think that’s a name, a household name, yet.
Angelo Fiouris: It’s not. It became one today, perhaps. Leading up to today, I don’t think there’s a great awareness of the Altice brand just yet. The reason for that is because they’re based in Europe. Altice is based in Europe. They’re a French company based in Amsterdam.
Tom Mullooly: So what Angelo is referring to is we happen to be recording this on the day that Altice Media went public.
Angelo Fiouris: That’s right. Altice USA went public today, the initial public offering. Pretty exciting day. We rang the bell at the stock market and everything today, so 200 employees were on scene and it was an exciting day for the company.
Tom Mullooly: All right, so tell us what your role is with Altice.
Angelo Fiouris: Sure. Basically I’m an account executive, right? What does that mean, I’m more of a consultant. I see myself as a guy that provides solutions to businesses that know they need help and to businesses that don’t yet know that they need help.
Tom Mullooly: I think you could probably count Mullooly Asset Management in that second group. We didn’t know that we needed help.
Angelo Fiouris: You might think that initially, but before you and I met, we had the appointment booked. I did a little research on you guys and I went to your website. I had looked at what you were already doing and I said, “Wow, these guys are ahead of the game. They have a podcast, they have a blog, they’re doing things that most small businesses don’t do.” Although you thought you didn’t have any help, you were actually helping yourselves. Now you’ve got the domination combination of TV with your digital efforts. You were farther ahead than you thought you were.
Tom Mullooly: (laughter). Do you want to talk a little bit about how we actually began working with you?
Angelo Fiouris: Sure. If I recall correctly, I got a call from your son, Tim, or an email from Tim on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. I won’t forget that because it was 2:00 in the afternoon and I said, “Wow, I’m not the only guy that works on a Friday afternoon before a holiday.”
Tom Mullooly: He’s got a slave driver for a dad.
Angelo Fiouris: There you go, right? I gave Tim a call that afternoon and we made the appointment. You guys were referred to me, if I’m not mistaken … I can’t remember where that was from. Oh, here’s what it was. Tim had filled out the online … that’s what it was. Yeah, that’s what it was. Online, we request some information regarding, so I had to think about that for a minute. There it is.
Tom Mullooly: We met in early September and our ads were running at the end of October.
Angelo Fiouris: I think the middle of October we were live, the third week or something like that. It didn’t take long.
Tom Mullooly: It didn’t take very long to turn this whole thing around.
Angelo Fiouris: It really doesn’t. There’s this misconception that TV is this long, drawn out, expensive process to participate in, especially on the part of the small local business owner, which maybe that reputation is rightfully earned. In the past, it kind of was an inaccessible sort of venue for the local guy to advertise, but times have changed mostly because of technology. We’ve been able to bring this thing down to the local level and offer it at the kind of rates that, as you well know, makes most business owners’ eyes pop out and say, “Wow. Really? That’s all it costs?”
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. It’s really very surprising. I know one of the first things I said to you when we met was, “I don’t want to have my company displayed in some cheesy cable TV commercial.” You want to talk about how you respond to something like that?
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah, of course. Listen, we’re conditioned. We’ve been watching cable TV now as consumers for more than 30 years, probably 35 at least. We have seen the evolution of the local cable ad. Think about the ones you were seeing that showed up on maybe the four channels they used to insert on in the early 80s. They were the cheesy used car guys, the local pizzeria.
It looked like it was done with a camcorder. Shaky visuals, not really a clear picture, clearly not a national level type of production, and everyone wants to avoid that. As time has evolved, now we’re 30 years into the technology and stuff like that. Even on the local level, producers are shooting in HD and 4K now actually and producing the kind of commercials that … some clients want the cheesy look, believe it or not.
Tom Mullooly: Yikes.
Angelo Fiouris: We’re only producing that if they want it.
Tom Mullooly: I had a client mention to me not that long ago that they’ve been looking for a TV commercial and they finally realized that they had seen it a half a dozen times. They said, “It’s extremely professional, it’s very slick, it’s really well done.” They told me in honesty, they were like, “We were looking for something a lot cheesier.”
Angelo Fiouris: Right. It blended in well.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. I’m really pleased with the way things worked out and I’m sure you’re hearing that from other clients, too. Why don’t you share with our audience a little bit about how you got started in the business?
Angelo Fiouris: Wow, that’s kind of a long story. Short end, I always was creative in some sense or other. This is a creative job just by the fact that I’m consulting or selling, so to speak. I was a graphic designer by trade, I guess, out of school. I did that for a little bit. I wasn’t finding it all that stimulating and started to venture out. I had met a couple people that were into video production.
I started hanging out with them, went on a couple of shoots. Ended up selling some advertising in a variety of different venues, a little bit of print, you’re talking about early 90s, mid-90s, which then eventually led to me doing other independent marketing projects, then working in ad agencies, then leading up to getting into Altice USA and selling cable instead of buying it like I used to.
Tom Mullooly: Okay. I get it. Great. How does someone like yourself get business? What’s the process? What do you do?
Angelo Fiouris: It’s like anyone else who is in a commission-based kind of environment. Is it a challenge? Yeah. It’s a challenge because you basically have to go find your own people. What do I do? I was opening the local newspaper to see who was already advertising in print and started calling them. I got a couple clients that way.
Tom Mullooly: That’s probably the easiest leap.
Angelo Fiouris: It is because at least you’ve got people that they may shut you down when you call them, but at least they’re someone who’s already open to the idea of advertising. They don’t have to be convinced of that. Now you just, on my part, just get them interested enough to hear how there’s another way to do things.
Tom Mullooly: Have you ever had anyone that’s gone straight to ads on cable without doing other kinds of advertising in print?
Angelo Fiouris: Like that being their first foray into any kind of advertising? It’s possible that that has happened. Nothing really jumps out at me as any one client saying, “Hey, we started from nothing” to started on TV. I think most people have had some experience with something. They’ve advertised in the local suburban newspaper or they’ve purchased a space in a local yearbook or put up a sign in front of their store or bought a billboard or something, so they’ve tried something. For whatever reason, TV always seems like that inaccessible, you know.
Tom Mullooly: Why? Why is that?
Angelo Fiouris: The reason is because, let’s go back in time maybe only five years, ten years. You would have had the conversation, you’d have been, “Hey, we’re interested in TV” and then a rep like me would have come in. You would have had the same conversation you and I had where we learn about each other. That rep would go back to the office, put together a schedule, and come back a week later and say to you, “Hey, Tom, for you to reach the most people, you need to be on USA, TBS, TNT, CNN, Fox News, USA. Here you go. $8,000 a month.”
Tom Mullooly: Yeah.
Angelo Fiouris: A small business owner like Tom says …
Tom Mullooly: No chance.
Angelo Fiouris: Exactly. That’s realistically how it was.
Tom Mullooly: And on top of that, the cost of putting together, shooting even a 30 second ad.
Angelo Fiouris: Right. That wasn’t including that.
Tom Mullooly: Right.
Angelo Fiouris: So there’s another cost associated there. This was precluding a lot of local guys, small businesses who could use the platform from participating. From that point on, they’re conditioned to just shutting the TV guy out as soon as he walks in the door. “Hey, I’m from Cablevision” or then Cablevision, now Altice. “Hey, I’m from Altice.” “No thanks.” “Hey, I’m from Optimum.” “No thanks.” “Hey, I’m from News 12.” “No thanks.” When you get them at least interested to hear our story, then they perk up a little bit and are amazed at the availability now.
Tom Mullooly: What really surprised me is that is exactly what I expected. I figured this was going to be a big-budget item, 4, 5, $6,000 a month. I just didn’t have any interest in it because it’s not only a large expense item in your profit and loss, but it’s also hard to quantify. Do you want to just talk for a moment or two about some of the data you were able to bring to us when we were putting together a plan?
Angelo Fiouris: I’m glad you asked me that question. Just yesterday, we were going over just another tool that we’ve been using to help pinpoint exactly where to find the people you’re trying to reach on the spectrum of over 100 networks that we insert on. Simple data.
Tom Mullooly: Insert, for people who are listening, insert is just drop an ad into the space.
Angelo Fiouris: Right. When the television program you’re watching goes to commercial, then you’ll see … you’ve even noticed this where a commercial will start, but then the local ad will come on top of it. Sometimes it will end and then the other one will be underneath?
Tom Mullooly: You still see a second of the last commercial that was, should have been there or something else.
Angelo Fiouris: Right, or was there. That’s a local insertion.
Tom Mullooly: Okay.
Angelo Fiouris: Basically we get a couple of, two times an hour or so depending on the network, opportunities to put our local advertisers into these networks. What do we do to put you on the appropriate networks? What we do nowadays is we use our set top boxes to provide us with information much like the Nielsen, which you might be familiar with, provides data information, ratings based on the small sample of boxes they have nationally or even regionally.
They model out what everybody’s watching. They’re pretty accurate, I guess. It’s the only currency that we’ve had to measure audience up until recently. Going back to Cablevision and now Altice, we’ve been using our set top boxes in a sense as Nielsen boxes, right? Every time a viewer or a subscribing household turns on their TV, that’s giving us anonymous information telling us what are they watching? How long are they watching for? What channel are they changing to from there and what are their habits over the course of their time as a subscriber?
Tom Mullooly: Can they tell that I’m watching Barney the Dinosaur when I come home from work?
Angelo Fiouris: Right. Let’s say you turn on the TV and you’re watching Channel 13 I guess is where Barney would be on, right? Public TV. We would know that you were watching. As long as you were watching it for more than five minutes, then we would know that it was … we would use it as valid viewership information.
Tom Mullooly: Okay. A question pops into my mind. You go to a lot of local businesses and they’ve got News 12 on. It’s on all day long. How does that skew the numbers?
Angelo Fiouris: It doesn’t. First of all, we don’t count commercial accounts into our data that we’re providing our clients. Automatically, commercial viewership is not included.
Tom Mullooly: It filtered out.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah. Let’s take what you’re asking me a step further and put it in the residential. You’re asking me what if the TV’s left on all day pretty much?
Tom Mullooly: I’m sure that there are people who just watch News 12 or the weather and traffic channel all the time for hours.
Angelo Fiouris: Right. What happens is let’s just say you put the TV on and let’s say you leave the TV on for your pet’s entertainment and you go off to work for eight hours. If there is not remote control interaction within a five hour window, then all of that data gets wiped and does not count.
Tom Mullooly: Wow.
Angelo Fiouris: Equally on the other side, if you’re not watching something for a minimum of five minutes, we don’t count anything less than that as part of the data.
Tom Mullooly: So the channel surfing, all that stuff gets filtered out.
Angelo Fiouris: It’s not like, boom, TNT, boom, USA, boom, Fox News. It doesn’t work that way. You have to settle in for at least five minutes, become a viewer, and then maybe you move on.
Tom Mullooly: Okay, that’s pretty interesting and you can get all of that from the set top.
Angelo Fiouris: All from the set top boxes. We’ve been collating this data for a couple of years now. When you look at the results, it’s pretty easy to say, “Okay, this household has a female, 30 to 35, a male.”
Tom Mullooly: Just by the shows they’re watching.
Angelo Fiouris: The kinds of networks, the times.
Tom Mullooly: So they don’t know the address and the name of the subscriber, they just know, “Okay, we see people who are female, in this age bracket, they’re watching …”
Angelo Fiouris: Basketball Wives, for example, on VH1.
Tom Mullooly: Okay. All right. Yeah.
Angelo Fiouris: Love and Hip Hop. [crosstalk 00:14:49] amongst women. I’m not pushing anyone’s show, I’m just throwing stuff out there-
Tom Mullooly: What’s the name of it?
Angelo Fiouris: You never even heard of it. It’s called Love and Hip Hop. Women in their 20s to mid-30s are watching this stuff in droves.
Tom Mullooly: Wow. I was going to throw out something like Oprah, Oprah reruns or something.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah, no, not so much.
Tom Mullooly: Wow. Okay.
Angelo Fiouris: No. Women are watching a few different networks and they’re all ones that men have probably never heard of.
Tom Mullooly: You got me on that one.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah. Identification Discovery. A big place to find women viewers.
Tom Mullooly: I have someone who mentioned that they saw our commercial on a channel I didn’t even know existed. It turns out you learn a little bit about people when they tell you where they saw your commercial. They watch these murder mysteries and there’s some channel that our ad showed up on. I had another client who emailed me and said, “I saw you on during the Rose Bowl.”
Angelo Fiouris: Right.
Tom Mullooly: We actually had more than a few clients who saw that. I ran into someone last week who said, “Oh, I know when I turn on a Met game, I’m going to see you.”
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah.
Tom Mullooly: That is, first of all for us, it’s very flattering.
Angelo Fiouris: It’s great exposure, too.
Tom Mullooly: It really, really is.
Angelo Fiouris: Sports and news are the two things that people watch most and watch live, right? Then they watch all the entertainment stuff.
Tom Mullooly: What is it that gets business owners to take the leap and say, “I’m going to do this”?
Angelo Fiouris: Sometimes it’s just timing on my part. I happen to walk into a joint at the right time and catch the guy when he’s already open to like, “We need more business” or “We need to get the word out” or something. He meets me and likes what I have to say and wants to learn more.
Tom Mullooly: I guess then it helps that if a business owner knows their demographics, then you can … you spent a lot of time with us lining up like, “Okay, tell us about your typical client profile.” We gave you two main demographics and you were able to say, “Hey, we think you should be on these channels here” and put together a package for us.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah. What happens is I’ll have a conversation, a meeting with the client, prospective client, and get a real sense of who’s walking in their doors. Who’s calling them up? Who’s emailing them? Who’s looking at their website? I have some idea because I have experience dealing with a wide variety of businesses. Ultimately, it’s that business owner that can truly tell me who he talks to every single day down to that, like we like to say in our office, the granular level. Okay?
Tom Mullooly: Yeah.
Angelo Fiouris: Once I get a good sense of that and I create a demographic profile, let’s just say for example, women, 35 to 45, household incomes of $75,000+ with a presence of children between the ages of four and eight in the household-
Tom Mullooly: Right.
Angelo Fiouris: We can actually narrow it down to those types of attributes to then pull the appropriate programming from the amount of viewership results we see from those homes that fit your demographics. We look for the things that make the most sense. We look for the things that are most economical and the things that are going to give you the most impact and try to combine and blend them together to make a schedule that focuses in on who you’re looking for in that house.
Tom Mullooly: I walked away from our early stage meetings thinking that this was more like Google AdWords than anything I had seen before in the sense that you could get pretty specific down to a certain age demographic and say, “We’re only going to show your ads during these periods here.” My original thinking as a business owner was, “Holy moly, these ads are going to run who knows when on who knows what channel. I think probably 85% of these ads are going to be wasted.” That’s not actually the case, is it?
Angelo Fiouris: No, it’s not the case. We’re really able to target things and narrow it down to the most appropriate networks also taking your budget into consideration. Every client has a different kind of budget. I’ve helped clients with budgets as small as $500 a month and clients as big of budgets of $15,000 a month. Everyone falls in between there.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. I know when I started with you, I said I wanted my budget to be zero. We just nudged it up a little above that and we’ve seen results. What’s something that you hear a lot from people? Maybe a misconception or something or a little misguided about when it comes to advertising or advertising on television?
Angelo Fiouris: Good question. The one objection that I seem to be faced most often is, “Everybody [DDR’s 00:19:48] everything.”
Tom Mullooly: Oh, and they skip through the commercials. Right.
Angelo Fiouris: And they skip through the commercials. Not only are they not watching live, it’s just the misconception, but if they are watching, everything’s recorded and we’re not getting the message in front of them. The truth of the matter is our data tells us, this is from our set top boxes, that 91% of our viewership is live.
Tom Mullooly: That’s interesting.
Angelo Fiouris: Less than 10% is a combination of video on demand and DVR and then TV everywhere, where you can log on [crosstalk 00:20:20] TV on your tablet or your phone or something like that. Small percentages. The reason is because live television still is a driver. The reason is news and sports. No one DVR’s that. Maybe you record a game if you’re going to be out and you’re going to get home and you’re going to eventually get caught up live, but you’re not recording a game to watch three, four days later like you might be doing with a movie or something.
The reality is people are still watching programs live because of social media. If they go onto Facebook, they’re going to find out what happened on Walking Dead and their night is going to be ruined. They have to watch it live or else at 10:00, they’re not going to be able to be in on the conversation just yet.
Tom Mullooly: Interesting.
Angelo Fiouris: Things like that are drivers to keep people watching live. They’re commenting while they’re watching. They watch a game, what do they do? They pick up their phones and they say, “Wow. What a home run by [inaudible 00:21:07].” You know what I mean?
Tom Mullooly: Yeah, we better get his name in before he gets released.
Angelo Fiouris: Right. The point is that our data is telling us. It’s not me making things up, it’s actual data that says 91% of viewership still is taking place live. The other thing that we’ve learned is that most viewership takes place outside of the prime time hours. We’ve got 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. which is considered prime time hours, but the majority of our viewership is taking place outside of those. 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. the next night.
Tom Mullooly: Wow.
Angelo Fiouris: People don’t work traditionally 9:00 to 5:00 as much as they used to. It’s often scattered.
Tom Mullooly: What you’re saying is you don’t see a big drop-off at midnight or maybe even 1:00 in the morning?
Angelo Fiouris: Naturally there’s a drop-off. The majority of people still do go to sleep and try to get a normal night’s sleep. What we have learned though is that viewership doesn’t plummet just because it’s 12:30 a.m. or 1:30 a.m. In fact, what we’ve learned is on networks like, places like Food Network or HGTV, very popular places, expensive places to advertise too I might add, places like that have maybe a 40% drop-off in audience after midnight compared to prime time. The rates drop 75%. If I told you, Tom, I can give you 45% of the prime time audience on Food Network an hour after prime time for 80% less of the price-
Tom Mullooly: A fraction of the cost.
Angelo Fiouris: What are you going to say to me? “Give me five”, you’re going to say.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. Pretty good.
Angelo Fiouris: It’s just one of those angles that we use the data to find places to give your commercial more impact when it airs.
Tom Mullooly: Pretty good.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah.
Tom Mullooly: Tell us some success stories. There’s got to be some stories that have really worked out really … worked out well.
Angelo Fiouris: There’s been a few. Here’s one for you. I have a client, I’ll throw him a plug, All American Gymnastics. They’re down in this area. They’re in Ocean, Ocean Township. It’s a gymnastics school. You send your kid, they learn gymnastics, they compete a little bit. Maybe they get to a higher level, but it’s a good plan and kids of all ages go. We met. They gave me an outline of their demographic, who they’re really trying to reach, and we put the total audience participation application that we use into play for them. They weren’t a big-budget client, okay?
Tom Mullooly: I’ve also got to think that a gymnastics place, they can’t be advertising for people in Ship Bottom, you know what I mean?
Angelo Fiouris: Right.
Tom Mullooly: Geographically, you’ve got to tighten up the circle, which is really … I thought this was fantastic. I’m sorry, I’m interrupting.
Angelo Fiouris: That’s okay. No, you’re not interrupting. That’s a good segue because I did neglect to say that the zone where she was located, we’re able to really offer a really localized zone where her commercial was not going to be seen in places too far away to generate any business. That’s another big highlight of what it is we’re doing. We are able to minimize or give you as big an area as you want to hit as well.
For Jan over at All American Gymnastics, it was a matter of bringing up her numbers, right? She started with me first quarter of last year 2016. We did all the data and stuff. By the end of the year, we had her up and running, had a commercial made. A very professional looking commercial, not cheesy. She started running and checking in. She’s like, “Okay, people are saying that they’re seeing it.”
By the end of the quarter and we did our review, she had said that their numbers were way up from the quarter the year before. She had also noticed that I guess as a byproduct of the schedule we had put together for her, she had noticed an influx of a segment of the demographic that she had never gotten before. She was suddenly seeing young Hispanic kids coming with their parents and signing up for the program and she had never gotten-
Tom Mullooly: No kidding.
Angelo Fiouris: Maybe inadvertently somehow through our data in looking for households with children that fit the ages she was looking for, we latched onto something somewhere and got the attention of Hispanic kids that lived in the area but didn’t know there was a gymnastics program available for them.
Tom Mullooly: Pretty good.
Angelo Fiouris: A pretty good one. She’s still on. She’s on a break right now, but she’s coming back by the end of the summer to start up for her fall program.
Tom Mullooly: That’s great.
Angelo Fiouris: It’s okay to take a break, by the way, sometimes.
Tom Mullooly: I would guess with something like that when summer break, kids are out of school, it probably works better even for the parents if they can get it all together during the school year, so that makes sense.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah, exactly. For some businesses, it makes sense to pull off at times and maybe reduce your investment. Other times, maybe you beef it up or whatever.
Tom Mullooly: These are real local businesses.
Angelo Fiouris: Right. These are not big box stores. This is mom and pop, really mom and pop. I deal with a local kennel in Freehold. This lady came to me last April of 2016 and she started out as a $500 a month client in April. By the time we got to July, her calendar was-
Tom Mullooly: This is three months.
Angelo Fiouris: Right, for boarding and grooming. By her third month, she’s booked solid.
Tom Mullooly: Wow.
Angelo Fiouris: She didn’t have any open space for the rest of the summer.
Tom Mullooly: That’s pretty good.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah. Her grooming business increased as well and she’s stayed on as a loyal customer. She’s referred other clients to me. She’s one of my, as we like to say in advertising, she’s one of my biggest evangelists. She toots my horn more than I toot my horn.
Tom Mullooly: That’s great.
Angelo Fiouris: I love that.
Tom Mullooly: It really is great. I know that I’ve been telling our story to other business owners as well. It really was an eye-opener for me because I fully expected to walk into the first meeting to say, “Hey, thanks for coming by. I’m really not going to listen to you, but I’m just being polite.”
Angelo Fiouris: That still happens.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. (laughter). It really turned out to be a good meeting and a good way to begin. What else? Some other success stories you can talk about.
Angelo Fiouris: Let me think about another client I can really talk about here. I want to think of one that has some real impact that can add to the story. I usually use Jan. Oh, Valerie’s Barber and Beauty. Here’s another one.
Tom Mullooly: Okay.
Angelo Fiouris: Valerie’s a lady who’s great. She was referred to me as well from someone else who had had success. She does hair restoration for men and for women. She’s a private, small, does it out of her studio which is attached to the back of her house. She has a wealth of experience in the industry, like 30 years’ worth, working for the big box type of hair restoration places that you’ve seen on TV. I’m not going to name them, okay, but you know the ones. She worked for them. She branched out on her own for quite some time and her process is the same as the big guys, but at a fraction of the price. That’s really her driving point.
Tom Mullooly: She’s got a good story.
Angelo Fiouris: She’s got an excellent story.
Tom Mullooly: I’ve seen her commercials. When you pointed them out to me, that’s when I was like, “Oh, okay.” I’ve seen her commercials running all the time.
Angelo Fiouris: A lot you see her commercial. Yeah. Her investment is not like some massive $5,000 a month investment.
Tom Mullooly: It can’t possibly be.
Angelo Fiouris: It’s impossible for her to sustain that, but her investment has grown since she started with me a year ago April. Her spend is double of what it was a year ago.
Tom Mullooly: Wow. That’s great. You see the results and you say, “Okay, you know what?” When you find something that works, you’re going to pour more money into it.
Angelo Fiouris: You know what was good about her, too? She’s a very involved client. What do I mean by that? We were on for three months, she was targeting women, we got some great results. She said, “Can we change the schedule to target men now?” We had a re-optimization meeting. We completely re-optimized to go after a different group. We had success while still kind of targeting the other group at a small level, but had then had success bringing in a whole other segment. Let’s go after the guys now. I did for her kind of what I did for you. Sports, sports, sports.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah.
Angelo Fiouris: Right? We found the men clients who are now walking around happy with heads of hair and not a depleted bank account to get it, either. All because they were able to connect with Valerie.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. That’s really great.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah, those are great stories.
Tom Mullooly: What are some of the things that you zoom in on when you’re meeting with a prospective client for the first time? What are the hot buttons that you want to talk about? I’m guessing if a business owner or a company has a good idea of what their target market is, it’s going to help.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah, absolutely. I think business owners have … actually, let me backtrack for second. I’ve asked clients or prospective clients, “Tell me about your typical … who’s your wheelhouse client?” “I don’t know.”
Tom Mullooly: Yikes.
Angelo Fiouris: That’s a scary place to start. If they don’t know, I don’t know and then I don’t have the focus I need to take them down the right path. I have to start asking some questions. “Who makes the phone call, the man or the woman?” “Oh, the woman usually calls.” “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere” and I’ll write female. “How old is that lady?” Then I get them start to think because they do know who their customer is, but they’ve never thought about who their customer is.
Tom Mullooly: They’ve never outlined it. Yeah.
Angelo Fiouris: That creates a muddled kind of approach to trying to bring customers in. If you’re not focused on who you’re trying to talk to, then you’re talking to nobody. You really have to get that message fine tuned and honed so that it’s hitting the areas you need it to.
Tom Mullooly: What do you think people should expect when they start advertising? If they’ve never done it before, whether it’s in print or on TV, how do you temper their expectations when we’re getting started? It’s exciting. You get your whole family to sit at the TV and watch, “Wait, it’s coming on. It’s coming on.”
Angelo Fiouris: Then there it is. It’s awesome.
Tom Mullooly: Then there it is. It’s like, “Okay …”
Angelo Fiouris: And then what?
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. When does the phone start ringing?
Angelo Fiouris: Right. It doesn’t happen that first day that it airs, I promise you that, unless you have some sort of amazingly special offer that’s only one day only. That’s a rarity. The first thing I would tell and I do tell everybody. One, give it time. A minimum of three months, but I like my people to try to stay on for six to really let it take root.
Nothing’s going to work overnight. Will you get some calls the first two, three, four weeks? Yeah, sure. It could happen. I have a client, The Little Gym of Sea Girt. They’re right across the street from you. They started with me Labor Day weekend of 2015. Before October, they were getting calls.
Tom Mullooly: That’s awesome.
Angelo Fiouris: That happens. It’s not an everyday occurrence with a client. It sometimes just happens that the message is just received very well and just timely and appropriate and it generates some quicker interest than, say, something that’s going to be a little more long term. You’re not a quick fix sort of product. You’re a guy that needs to get your message out all year long so that the person who then realizes they need your services is already familiar with you by the time they need to make that decision.
Tom Mullooly: Correct. Yeah. It’s a long lead time for us. Much longer pipeline than some other businesses, but it does work.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah.
Tom Mullooly: Angelo, this has been fantastic. Tell us how people can reach you.
Angelo Fiouris: I could go on all day about this stuff too, by the way. There’s a couple different ways you can reach me. You can email me. Angelo.fiouris@alticeusa.com. That’s a tough one.
Tom Mullooly: You better spell that.
Angelo Fiouris: Yeah. Angelofiouris@alticeusa, that’s alticeusa.com.
Tom Mullooly: It’s angelo.fiouris.
Angelo Fiouris: I think it works without the dot too, but it says a dot on my card. I just make sure I get it out right. Or you can call me, 732-243-2904. That’s my office line.
Tom Mullooly: Okay, fantastic. Angelo, thanks for coming in and doing this. It’s been great. I always learn something during these podcasts. You’re a fantastic guest because I can give you one question and you can really answer it well and everybody can see the word picture, you know what I mean?
Angelo Fiouris: Right.
Tom Mullooly: In terms of answering the questions, so thanks for coming on board today.
Angelo Fiouris: I hope people benefited from this.
Tom Mullooly: Yeah. Great.
Angelo Fiouris: Thank you.
Tom Mullooly: Okay, thanks.
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