This Is Helium

Helium Agency, a full-service media agency led by two industry veterans, made its formal debut this week at baseball’s Winter Meetings in Las Vegas.

Will Lingo and George Shelton formed Helium Agency earlier this year, and have spent recent months organizing the company and lining up partners. Helium will be announcing its initial partnerships throughout December.

“I’m incredibly excited to have Helium Agency officially under way, and look forward to working with a lot of great new partners,” Lingo said. “As George and I talked with each other about where our next steps would take us, we realized that the best course would be to set out on our own.

“With all the experience we have together not only with content and sales and marketing, but across digital, social and print media, it just made sense to use all those skills. We want to build up our own company, of course, but we want to help other companies that are great at their core business but don’t have the time or expertise, or even the desire to focus on the media side.”

George

The company is based in Durham, N.C., at the American Underground building downtown at Main and Corcoran streets.

Coincidentally, the office is on the second floor of the building, the former site of the offices of Baseball America, where Lingo and Shelton first began working together.

Lingo worked for Baseball America for more than 20 years, rising through the ranks of the editorial staff to become managing editor and then editor in chief. He became director of editorial and operations in 2012 and took oversight of the entire business in 2014 as Publisher. He left Baseball America in 2017 after the company changed ownership.

Shelton worked for Baseball America for more than a decade (in two stints), most recently as director of advertising. In addition to managing relationships with national brands such as Adidas, Rawlings and Wilson, Shelton oversaw all of Baseball America’s advertising operations and managed its sales staff. He left Baseball America in May.

In their time together at Baseball America, Lingo and Shelton introduced new digital advertising initiatives such as 30 Days of Giveaways and grew digital advertising revenue by __ percent, as well as creating new experiential sponsorships such as the Prospect Pad, which created unique content and interaction with players from Major League Baseball’s All-Star Futures Game.

For more information on Helium Agency, visit helium-agency.com