Pop the corn and dim the lights … Slightly Mad is ready for its close-up. Readers of this blog may recall Bill Klein, the chief operating officer of Emerge Sales, a Long Island-based marketing, training, and telecommunications company with offices in Albany and Houston.
They might also remember that Bill and Emerge President Michael Sperduti have formed a strategic alliance with Slightly Mad – exchanging their cutting-edge consulting, lead-generation and telemarketing skills for a bottom-up rebranding of Emerge and its expert services.
Bill, readers may also know, is a television star. He and his wife, Dr. Jennifer Arnold, are reality TV personalities on TLC (if you’ve missed them there, you might have caught them on the talk-show circuit, visiting everyone from Oprah to Dr. Oz).
Lest there be any confusion, these are not those obnoxious, embittered headline hounds with the eight kids and the messy divorce. Quite the opposite: Bill and Jen are “The Little Couple,” happy newlyweds who each happen to be four feet or shorter.
If you’ve seen the show – a spin-off of the TLC special “Little People: Just Married” – you know Jen is one of the nation’s top neonatologists and a serious bigwig at Texas Children’s Hospital. And you know Bill, according to the show’s intro, is “a business owner.”
Yeah, that’s a little vague, and so Bill is undergoing a bit of a rebranding himself. While considerable in their own right, his accomplishments are sometimes overshadowed on “The Little Couple” by Jen’s medical renown, so the show’s producers are working hard during this second season to show Bill in action – and that’s how a TLC crew found its way recently to us.
Back in October, TLC cameras followed Bill and Michael here to our office, where the Emerge principals spent the day discussing taglines, websites and other marketing initiatives with our creative rock stars. The daylong visit will result in about seven minutes of airtime during the Jan. 12 episode.
“This is an awesome opportunity for us and a tremendous honor,” says Slightly Mad COO Michael Kitakis, who features prominently in the Jan. 12 episode alongside Chris Graz. “It was really exciting to have the TLC production crew here, and we’re psyched to see the final product when it airs next week.
“This is really a once-in-a-lifetime shot for an agency like ours,” Mr. Kitakis adds.
The Emerge rebranding, by the way, is going swimmingly. After crafting a clever new slogan and a brilliant new logo, we designed and launched Emerge’s new website back in November; right now we’re exploring the options for newly printed brochures, and – along with the rest of Slightly Mad’s strategic partners – plotting out a brilliant webinar series that will give listeners the ultimate edge as the economic recovery takes form.
New episodes of “The Little Couple” air 10 pm Tuesdays on TLC. Check us out next week!