Looks like my department of soon-to-be-one has another happy customer. This guy runs an ad network comprised of posters/billboards in high traffic areas of health clubs. I threw together a code for him right before New Year's so that he could run reach and frequency numbers, and tossed together a spreadsheet with some numbers for him to look over.

In a nutshell, he will be able to estimate how many people (raw numbers and as a percentage) of Adults 18+, Women 18-34, or whatever see his advertising how many times on average, over the course of a month, two months, etc. This is pretty key when trying to sell in the idea of advertising with his "network" to ad agency media planners. He and I both had a few questions for each other. Conference call!

I'd never spoken to the guy before, but he's a research type, so we spoke the same language while our sales person stayed mostly mum. I asked about how he came up with an estimated frequency number (per visit) that I'd never seen before his email, and which wasn't included in the custom research done for them by a third party. Wasn't confrontational, but explained that chances are pretty high that we would get questions from the ad agency people about the numbers, and we would need to be able to explain their basis if asked.

Interestingly enough, he sounded glad that I had asked the question, and relieved that I as a fellow researcher felt comfortable going with and incorporating that number into their final numbers that come out of our system. I was also in tune with his ultimate objective of getting his sales people numbers they needed to go do their job and sell the ad space, but sort of from the opposite side of the fence, inasmuch as I knew what I wanted to see from a sales person, when they called on me, and I knew what they would and would not accept as reasonable.

I can get him revised numbers to look at by the end of the week. They still may undergo further refinement, but we're most of the way there. His questions to me were mostly about how people with our software could manipulate the national estimate to either make a single market or regional buy, or, if necessary, scale the numbers up to include additional health clubs as they add to their network. All easily done "on the fly" by any media planner, without our having to develop and re-issue new codes via software distribution. He was cool with that.

We also briefly discussed whether his company sold its women-only clubs separately from the co-ed ones, and whether it might be worth our developing separate codes for the sub-groups. Answer = "not at this point, but maybe in the future." It would have potentially meant more revenue for us if he had wanted us to develop additional codes, but since it's not yet an issue for him, why push it? My objective was to make him comfortable that I knew what I was doing, had his best interest and objectives in focus, and was thinking ahead should his needs change.

Mission accomplished. I made progress on several other projects today, but this was the main one that actually involved directly dealing with the client. Froggie's going to go to bed happy tonight.