Tim Whitley, who was trained as a meteorologist, came up with a forecast years ago predicting torrents of numbers and overflowing streams of data.
So he stopped doing the weather and moved into rebranding TV stations for Nexstar Broadcasting. Then he left KARK-TV, Channel 4, and ventured into data-driven advertising, founding Team SI in Little Rock in 2010. Last week he talked about the firm’s success in landing an $800,000 digital marketing contract from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.
“I’ve always loved data,” said Whitley, 32, a Texas native and graduate of Mississippi State University. “My degree is in meteorology, and at the TV station, I was a Nielsen nerd. I wanted to know what the demographics were. Even the first website I built, back in 1998, was based on data.”
So the contract with the AEDC, which promotes Arkansas to businesses considering settling or expanding in the state, was right up Whitley’s information alley. The commission broke up its longstanding single contract into three contracts this year, and chose CJRW of Little Rock for the other two contracts, for advertising and marketing and for public relations.
CJRW made its extensively detailed proposals public. Team SI, an affiliate of Mangan Holcomb Partners, blacked out 50 of the proposal’s 60 pages. Nothing was withheld in the nearly 200 pages of the two winning CJRW bids.
“A lot of the stuff in our presentation was proprietary,” Whitley explained. “It laid out what our system does. We had to redact, because whoever harnesses the best and most information is the winner these days. We really would have been revealing the secret sauce.”
“We want to be niche in our targeting,” Whitley added, “making sure that every dollar is spent getting the right message to the right people at the right time.” He said his system houses 188 different data providers, and that constantly updated data had helped Team SI become the fastest-growing private company in the state, No. 267 in the 2015 Inc. 500, rising from a handful of clients to 300 in six years.
The three AEDC contracts are valued at $800,000 each, though AEDC officials described those amounts as flexible.
Darin Gray, chairman and CEO of CJRW, said on Wednesday that his entire team deserves credit for landing the two contracts, but he gave a special nod to three colleagues he assembled to talk about it: longtime Little Rock ad man Gary Heathcott and vice presidents Mark Raines, in public relations, and Jill Joslin, director of account services.
“This firm has been telling Arkansas’ story for 30 years,” Gray said, referring to CJRW’s widely praised work for Arkansas Parks & Tourism. “It made some sense for us to be telling a similar story, attracting companies and jobs to the state just as we have helped attract visitors.” He pointed to an advertisement in the June issue of Delta Airlines’ Sky magazine as an example of the synergy. The ad, jointly sponsored by the ArkansasEDC.com and Arkansas.com, the state tourism site, featured the legacy of Johnny Cash as a tourist lure for the Arkansas Delta.
Gray noted that his first job had been with the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, the forerunner to the AEDC. “There’s a new day in Arkansas, and it’s all about results,” he said.
Joslin said that the AEDC’s “request for qualifications” was different from past state requests for ad agency proposals. “This one didn’t ask for self-promotion,” she said. “This one asked specific questions. The answers were basically ‘Here’s what we can do.’ And I’m glad to see the state going in that direction.”
Heathcott said that too often in the past, both private and state contracts were awarded on the basis of an engaging in-person pitch, rather than on solid and proven proposals.
“So much relied on a good dog and pony show,” Heathcott said. “The RFQ process lets you show the work, and Jill and her team pulled more than one all-nighter. This whole table was covered with work.” “The floor, too,” Joslin added with a laugh.
CJRW announced last week that it has hired Katherine Vasilos, director of operations and special projects for the Arkansas House of Representatives and former communications director for the state Republican Party, to work on the AEDC account, among others.
Gray said Vasilos’ past political work wasn’t a factor. “She’s just a dandy,” he said. “She has the contacts, connections and the insights that we need to be effective. Politics wasn’t a consideration. I’m an old football guy, and we just went out and got a No. 1 draft pick.”
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