August 2019 – Sandra Younts, president of Capital Co-op Consultants in Washington, D.C., is recognized in the broadcasting industry as a success story in broadcast co-op and vendor sales specialist.  Sandra’s career path first crossed with Bill McGee’s in the 1970s. Bill was busy at the helm of his company, Broadcast Marketing Company, in San Francisco, and was already regarded as an expert on co-op advertising. He had written the definitive book on the subject (“A What, When and How Guide to Broadcast Co-op: The Untapped Goldmine”) and rolled out the successful companion subscription service, CO-OPPORTUNITIES.  He was invited to be a Charter Member of the Co-operative Advertising Hall of Fame.

Thanks to the Internet, Sandra Younts found our website this month and sent Bill an email. We thought she’d be interested in Bill’s recent memoir, THE BROADCASTING YEARS, 1958–1989: Memoir of a Television Pioneer.  After reading it, here’s what she had to say…

Reading this memoir about Bill McGee’s 32-year career in broadcasting brought back many memories of my own career.

I grew up in my family’s broadcasting business. In 1947, my parents, Jack Spurgeon Younts and Elizabeth M. Younts, signed on WEEB Radio in Pinehurst, North Carolina.

In 1978, after getting my degree in Radio, TV and Motion Pictures at the University of North Carolina, I went to work for a Field Communications UHF station, WLVI-TV 56 Boston.  I was hired to be a co-op advertising coordinator and commercial television writer/producer. I had no experience with co-op advertising and had to learn fast. Simply put: co-op advertising is a cost-sharing arrangement whereby a vendor and their retail customer share the cost of an ad. Co-op advertising often made the difference in whether or not a small business could afford to advertise at all.

This is where Bill McGee’s 1975 “how-to” guidebook came into play, “A What, When and How Guide to Broadcast Co-op: The Untapped Goldmine”. The book explained in detail what co-op advertising was, how to use it, and how to sell it. The book became my career-long bible. With Bill’s book in hand and his patience with my initial phone calls to him, I went on to prove that the “Goldmine” was indeed for real – and a big one. I scored touchdown and touchdown and kept my co-op sales confidence right on the money. You could say, I owed my success in broadcast sales in large part to Bill McGee.

In the years to come, I was singled out by the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) in New York. They referred calls to me from people all over the country who wanted help with co-op advertising. In 1980, the RAB invited me to be a panelist in Tarrytown, New York. Afterwards, they sent me a plaque praising me for being their “Star” at their Co-op Confidential Meetings.

In the mid-1980s, I launched my own company, Capital Co-op Consultants, in Washington, D.C. Soon after, Bill McGee called and asked if I would mind if he listed me under “Consultants” in the Appendix of his revised co-op book, “Broadcast Co-op: STILL The Untapped Goldmine” (1987). Would I mind? Thanks a million, Bill McGee!

When Bill’s broadcasting memoir opens, he is already an established star salesman and deal maker. (He wrote about this in his recently-published fifth memoir, “How I Learned to Sell and Make Deals, 1950–1958”.) Bill tells how he got his start in broadcasting in syndicated television program sales (selling “Our Miss Brooks”, “Cannonball”, and other successful series), moving next to national radio and TV station rep, then to television station management, and lastly to the launch of his own successful company in San Francisco in 1971, Broadcast Marketing Company.

“The Broadcasting Years” is Bill’s sixth memoir in a series of seven and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in a career in the sales segment of broadcasting.”
– Sandra Louise Younts, President, Capital Co-op Consultants