Tim Andrews, president and CEO of the Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), is a big proponent of sustainability and AI, worries about consolidation, and says only the excitement of it all keeps him up at night.
“If there’s a B2B player that isn’t thinking about how sustainability is in their industry, I think that’s a mistake,” Andrews, president and CEO of ASI since 2002, told me recently in a Zoom Interview. “Frankly, they need to be thinking about that, because even if the participants in their industry aren’t yet focused on it—and I’m doubtful there’s any industry where there aren’t people focused on it—they have players and important [people who are].”
Andrews leads a staff of 350 for a company that serves a network of 25,000 suppliers, distributors and decorators in the $26 billion promotional products industry. Yes $26 billion. He started as a journalist at Dow Jones before moving into a variety of roles there. He then ran the B2B publishing division at Primedia, before being recruited to join ASI, a family-owned company founded in the mid-‘50s.
“Interestingly enough, ASI’s workforce is about the same size it was 22 years ago when I joined, but it’s a very different makeup of skills and work and effort,” Andrews said. “We have around 140 technologists now. We had 24 technologists 20 years ago. So we really have transformed the work that people are doing and the challenges that they’re overcoming—and in terms of the kinds of things we’re doing from a product perspective.”
In late April, ASI acquired PRINTING United Alliance, a member-based printing and graphic arts association. The deal included a magazine, website, search engine for product search—“which is important in our promotional products industry,” Andrews said—and some valuable hosted buyer events, adding to the ones ASI already has.
“That will allow us to help people that sell promotional products today understand how to add print products to their portfolio for their customers,” Andrews said, “and also allow them to be much more knowledgeable about the different decks. That’s a very hyper-innovative space right now… So it’s really a great win for ASI—and our members as well.”
I asked Andrews what worries him. He mentioned the trade shows—that attendance and exhibitors have not quite returned to 2019 levels yet—but then quickly said, “It’s not really keeping me up at night. I would say consolidation. We can all look at different industries where consolidation has been okay and appropriate. But then we can also look at a lot of industries where consolidation has been very hurtful to the industry that’s being served, and to the people that are being served.”
ASI’s news page shows at least 5 M&A deals in the industry in the last month alone, the biggest being S&S Activewear acquiring alphabroder—the second- and third-largest suppliers in the field.
But then Andrews flashed his positive personality. “I probably think if something is keeping me up at night, it’s how exciting a time it is to live and work. Who would have thought we could be using AI in the ways we [do], or technologies?… So if I’m losing sleep. It’s about exciting things, not negative things.”
Here is more from our Q&A:
SIIA Media Alert: The M&A trend in your industry mirrors in some ways those in the B2B space. How do you look at that?
Tim Andrews: There are a lot of examples of mergers that frankly have not worked out so well. Some do, and some don’t. That’s always the concern of distributors who are buying from these suppliers… ASI just did an acquisition, and so I certainly know the pain points of bringing an organization together from a technology, people and product perspective. And so [it is with] these big mergers, across the entire B2B spectrum. And I’ve been watching these for 25 years.
I’ve written about sustainability in our industry and haven’t sensed a huge urgency—except maybe Questex which has an initiative. But in your industry it has to be very big. How do you approach that?
Typically, sustainability is really quite important for us because so many of the organizations [we serve] are targeting people who care about the planet. We thought 10 years ago this was maybe a trend [but] it’s really turned into a global movement… All the products we want to have kept forever. But we know that sometimes they have a lifespan. So we want to make sure that whatever is being created and distributed represents the brands and the values of the brand, but also that these are products that are in fact manufactured and distributed in a very sustainable way. In fact, we were writing so much about it that we actually set up a resource site on our website separately that’s called Promo for the Planet.
Perhaps other media companies don’t have members who deal with sustainability like you do. But it’s going to affect them at some point.
Any B2B organization that’s serving its industry needs to be thinking about how do we help that transparency? How do we educate people about what this is, what the different terms are, how to be appropriate in sourcing product and shipping product. And really in all aspects. So I think it’s a huge, huge area for every single B2B player… And certainly as younger buyers and participants come into the purchasing of any product, they’ll want to know, ‘Where did this product come from? Is it safe?’ And they want that transparency of the supply chain.
You have a big event coming up in October.
The ASI Power Summit is about 150 C-level individuals in our industry that we bring together once a year. It’s an invitation-only event, and we really try to [encourage leaders] to talk about the big topics in our industry. We’ll be just about 2 or 3 weeks out from the election, so we want to help our industry participants understand the key topics and what is likely to happen after the election. We also have a number of large trade shows and other activities.
I read a very good article you wrote about a year ago on AI. How is AI affecting your organization and how do you use it?
I look at it in two different ways. One is, how are we using it internally, and then how we’re using it with our products. First of all internally, we’re using it tons from everything like taking a marketing piece that’s an email and asking AI to write five versions of it… or five subject lines and then testing and tweaking those. And then, from an external perspective, we’re actually embedding AI in some of our products. For instance, ESP is a product database and a technology platform that our distributors use to create presentations for their clients. We’ve added AI, so that at the beginning of the creation of the presentation, the user of the platform puts in the name of the client and the event that they’re buying promotional products for. And our software or our AI looks at the entire website of that organization and… drafts the subject line and uses the colors from the website and logo to customize the presentation.
That’s interesting. Much of the National Journal’s successful transition pivoted on creating presentations. Members really desired them.
It’s amazing what the tools can do. I’m using [AI] every day, and frequently for all sorts of things. So if people are not using something as basic as ChatGBT, or the Microsoft version that’s built in, [they should be]. It’s really something that can be used all day looking for information. It’s really an amazing thing. I was asked recently by one of our employees, “Is this going to eliminate jobs?” My answer was, “The only people who might lose their jobs because of AI are people that don’t use AI.”
