Agency Hopes to Make Mark With Perot Job : Advertising: Little-known Encino-based company is handling the maverick businessman’s campaign to gain converts to his watchdog group.

On the surface, Inter/Media Advertising, an Encino-based advertising agency, seems an unusual choice to handle billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s campaign to win converts to his new political watchdog group, United We Stand America.

Inter/Media, despite its $85 million in annual billings in 1992, is relatively unknown among advertising professionals.

The company works in an end of the advertising business that is disdained by many agencies--Inter/Media makes no-frills TV and print commercials that encourage immediate responses from viewers through the use of 800-telephone numbers. For years, most of Inter/Media’s business was in the area of buying commercial time for its clients, negotiating cut-rate deals with television stations for customers who wanted immediate response to their ads.

And while the agency hasn’t attracted major corporate clients--current clients include National Medical Enterprises, a chain of psychiatric hospitals looking for patients who suffer from depression, and a company called 1-800 CARSEARCH--its no-nonsense approach apparently appealed to Perot.

Last month, the maverick businessman picked the 19-year-old agency to buy TV time and develop new ads for his campaign to draw new members to his political group.

“Within 48 hours of our making initial contact with them, they put together an entire proposal, flew down here and presented it,” said Russ Monroe, who is coordinating Perot’s United We Stand membership drive. “They told us how they were going to test it, they told us how they were going to roll it out, and they told us how they were going to keep track of the results.”

Officials at Inter/Media hope that the job will be the company’s ticket to recognition. “We’re thrilled,” said Robert Yallen, executive vice president and chief operating officer. “It helps to dignify the type of advertising that we do.”

According to Yallen, Inter/Media will concentrate initially on buying time for several 60-second commercials that Perot and his staff have already made. Part of Inter/Media’s appeal to Perot, according to Yallen, was the company’s plan to emphasize cable TV ads over local independent stations, a tactic the billionaire used during much of his presidential campaign.

According to Monroe, however, the agency has also been charged with improving the existing Perot ads and whittling some of them down to 30 seconds. Inter/Media will also develop print ads for the campaign.

The Perot commercials, which started running in late January on cable TV, carry an 800 number viewers can call to express interest in joining United We Stand America.

So far, the TV ads are running on Cable News Network, Headline News, USA Channel, Prime Ticket, the Family Channel and several others. Local commercials are also running in Portland, Maine, Cincinnati, Denver, Settle and Houston, cities where Perot did well in last fall’s presidential election.

One reason Perot chose Inter/Media, according to Yallen, is that the company is able to track the responses to its ads, using a computer software program to pinpoint the city from which a viewer called the 800 number and the time of the call. Yallen said it will enable the Perot group to tell which ads work best and which regions of the country provide the most response.

The software also analyzes the cost of the ad in relation to the number of responses, so that a client can essentially tell how how much each response cost in order to decide whether the expense warrants continuing the campaign.

The Perot organization, however, has forbidden Inter/Media to release any data it obtains, so it is difficult to ascertain how well the campaign is doing.

Similarly, United We Stand America has refused to say how many members it would like to attract in the campaign, other than to cite Perot’s roughly 20 million votes in the election and claim that 20 million more would have voted for him had they believed his candidacy was viable.

Inter/Media was founded in 1974 by Sydney Yallen, a former radio and television station executive who says he got his start in the business “at a little station called KFWB, back when the ‘WB’ stood for Warner Brothers” and the pay for office boys was $5 a week.

After rising to station manager in the 1950s, Sydney Yallen left in 1959 to move into the syndication business. In the mid-1960s he switched to advertising--buying commercial time and charging customers less than a full-service ad agency would charge--and later formed his own company.

Inter/Media has grown tremendously in recent years, in part because of the rise in direct-response advertising, the kind of commercials that provide an 800 number or an address to which viewers can respond. According to Sydney Yallen, Inter/Media’s president, the company’s billings were about $10 million in 1980.

By 1986, he said, billings were $30 million, and by 1991 Inter/Media’s billings hit $83.5 million.

An advertising agency’s billings are the total amount it charges customers, including the money the agency spends buying television time and advertising space in publications.

Typically, the money left over--about 15% of total billings--is what an agency must use to pay expenses and make a profit.

Last year, with the recession putting a damper on growth, Inter/Media’s billings crept up to $85 million, Sydney Yallen said, but the agency also laid off a few workers and now has 65 employees.

Direct response “is an area that continues to grow every year,” said Ron Bliwas, president of A. Eicoff and Co., a major direct-response agency based in Chicago.

The business, he said, has moved beyond advertisers for vegetable slicers, and enticed major corporations, such as A. Eicoff’s clients AT&T;, American Express and Sears, Roebuck and Co.

“A lot of things that a lot of ad agencies would have looked down on in the past are big business now,” said Marcy Magiera, a senior reporter for the trade publication Advertising Age.

Companies such as Inter/Media, she predicted, might get more attention in the future as advertising focuses on the area of direct response.

One problem, according to industry analysts, is that the direct response and media-buying business has long been associated with hard-sell, late-night advertising of the slicing-and-dicing variety.

Inter/Media, for instance, counts as clients Faces International, a book where modeling hopefuls can pay to have their pictures published, and Inventor’s Hotline, a company that recently was the subject of criticism by the television show “Inside Edition.”

The push to raise the agency’s profile comes mostly from Robert Yallen, 35, a lawyer who has dreams of making his father’s company a major player.

Despite the new Perot campaign, however, several advertising industry executives, including the spokeswoman for the Direct Marketing Assn. in New York, and a reporter who covers the direct-response business for Advertising Age magazine, said they had not heard of Inter/Media.

To keep Inter/Media growing, Robert Yallen said he hopes to acquire one or more small companies within the next year as part of an effort to make Inter/Media’s services more comprehensive.

In the end, he predicted, the company will win the respect of others in the industry because its ads and its 800 numbers--while not necessarily beautiful in the creative sense--get results.

“In the direct-response business, what you look for is a sale at the lowest feasible cost,” Yallen said.

“There are companies that win creative awards, and they’re out of business the next year.”