Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
[Operator Instructions].
Steven S. Fishman - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Rochelle, are we seeing any questions at this time?
Operator
Yes, hold on, just a moment please. Our first question is from the line of David Mann at Johnson Rice.
David Mann - Johnson Rice
Yes, good morning. Nice job guys.
Steven S. Fishman - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you.
Joe R. Cooper - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thank you.
David Mann - Johnson Rice
In terms of the comments made on gross margin, when we look at the back half of the year, the sequential improvement you are looking for, can you just drive down a little deeper in terms of how you expect perhaps your promotional cadence and the mix to affect that or any other factors in terms of that improvement?
Steven S. Fishman - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, David, from a promotional cadence, I don't think you are going to see anything significantly from an expense standpoint than last year, other than I will tell you we have some real surprisingly powerful plans from a marketing standpoint, particularly media. There is going to be a shift and I will give you two seconds on it. We are going to be spending the same amount of money because of the efficiencies we have been able to continue to call out of our paper part of the pre-prints, we have been able to take that savings, still run the same amount of pages and pre-prints that we ran last year and put additional money, that savings money into media, television particularly. And I think you will recall last year we were real pleased with our performance last year when it came to television and the message we were able to send across to the customer base that we have out there and hopefully there are some new customers.
We've made a change recently in the last 30 days in our advertising agency, for the first time in many-many years in the company because we felt it was rightly so time to move on to something a little bit different and we are really excited about the ideas that we have for media for the fourth quarter in particular, but to say the least, I am not going to share any of it with you right now other than to say that we think it's really different, it's really unique, it will continue to drive home what Big Lots is all about and the great brand names and savings that we offer, so from that perspective.
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