Ad man answers the call

By JOHN SWINFIELD
Updated:

 

BEN CLARKE decided early on he wanted more control over his life than his father, the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke, a Royal Academician and artist of international repute.

'Once Dad has created his pieces he has little or no say beyond that point, he is so much in the hands of other people,' says Ben, founder of fast-growing Datapride Communications.

'I wanted more control, my efforts and endeavour less governed by others.'

After reading modern languages at Salford University he sold space for poster sites. 'Languages came fairly easily. And I already had Spanish,' says Clarke, whose mother is from Spain. 'Selling space is tough. But it's great training.'

He was determined to have his own business. After a whip-round among friends and relatives, including his mother, he raised £30,000 to set up a company specialising in advertising boards with built-in phones. At a railway station for instance, you might see Clarke's boards offering products and services.

Beside each advertisement there is a button. Press it and you are switched by Freefone to the advertiser.

Clarke's brainwave has caught on. He started eight years ago and now has boards at 800 sites around the country. 'We will stick them anywhere where there are a lot of people, from supermarkets to universities, wherever we can get the go-ahead from the site owner,' he says.

Some sites are leased and others are free because owners regard the boards as an extra facility for their customers. Advertisers pay him an average of £1000 a year. 'Academic institutions like the boards,' he says. 'We carry health lines and counselling services.'

Clarke says the advertising downturn has not affected him. 'Some advertisers are saying they are slowing down and cutting back. But our advertisers seem to be beefing things up to get an advantage over the opposition. 'It's the old story about customers advertising their way out of a possible recession.

'Certainly site permissions for our engineers and so on have been tightened up, especially at railway stations and airports.

'We came through the foot-and-mouth crisis OK. A lot of people thought advertisers on our boards would cut back on those in rural situations. But the opposite turned out to be the case.

'It is not an expensive form of advertising, so some advertisers might be switching into us from other more costly types.' It is a lucrative business in which Clarke can keep a tight grip on his fixed overheads. From a turnover of about £1.4m, gross profits are in excess of £750,000.

'Most of the advertisers are on a year-long contract,' he says. 'Sometimes, rarely, the boards need servicing. So we have to have our own staff to do that.

'The boards are pretty vandal-proof. In some locations they need to be. We have given them the sledge-hammer test.'

Clarke employs 40 people at his company, based in Cambridge, many of them in telephone sales. He says: 'When we started we had a bunch of people working the phones. And boy! - they were really ferocious. They got results. But they were unreliable. Coming and going all the time, a high churn-rate.

'So we moved into mail shots. That worked well. Now we have got a mix of phone and mail sales. And we are doing all the right things - lots of training, the churn is much less, everybody is focused.'

He says: 'The exciting thing is that we can have an idea, put it to somebody, garner the appropriate advertising for the location - and be up and running, in business with the site, in three weeks flat.'

Clarke, 33, says he is developing sites with an internet facility. 'That will give us a new dimension. It will still be advertising driven.

'I want to float the company within three years. That will give us an exit route, and it should secure the future of a few key people here who have been with me from the start.'

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