Talk to most list brokers and, much like print firms, you wouldn’t be too surprised to hear them say the market is tougher than a sunbed lover’s hide, with the days of achieving even £75 per thousand names a distant memory.
The demise of Reed Business Information’s Mardev-dm2 – and the subsequent sell-off rumours – seemed to have confirmed the worst. After all, if a company that size can’t make enough money out of the business, what hope do the rest have?
But scratch under the surface and you’ll find all is not quite as grim as it seems. US giant MeritDirect certainly thinks there’s potential for profits, and last week opened its London office as a launch-pad for European expansion plans, spearheaded by former Mardev-dm2 chief Karie Burt.
And rather than see the company’s plans as a threat, Lloyd James managing director Lynn Stevens welcomes the move.
“It’s heartening to see that MeritDirect are investing in setting up in the UK, although we are yet to see what their offering will be,” she said. “It would be refreshing to see new data contributors coming into the market and we are hoping to get this from Merit, as opposed to the typical B2B scenario where we see numerous vendors with various guises of the same dataset.”
Yet she does concede that Mardev’s demise has left a gap in the market, “DecisionMaker was a great product”.
Her views are echoed by Caspian founder Irit Reed, who was not surprised Merit has launched in the UK, but she was shocked at Mardev’s choice. “I would say their closure was more to do with internal changes at Reed rather than a reflection of the market,” Reed added.
Now in its 12th year, Caspian has witnessed growth in both broking and management income during the past 12 months. Reed said: “If a company offers years of experience and knowledge but keeps up with innovation and is strong in buying cost-effectively for their clients (and not greedy), then a broker/manager can still be successful.”
Reed admits that the market has shrunk but maintains this hasn’t diminished the need for advertisers and their agencies to seek independent and specialist advice.
“Not only do brokers offer an unbiased source of knowledge and experience but we offer insight from working cross industry. There can also be a monetary benefit to clients based on volumes bought by a broker which can be passed on to their clients. A broker often works as an extension to the data department of an agency or marketing department within a client company thereby reducing their staff costs,” she added.
And for Joanne Clayton (right), founder of the Data Bubble Consultancy, life as a list broker is “excellent”. She explained: “Not everyone knows how to collect data, where to get it, or even how to select it to maximise their campaign. I offer the human touch – I explain about how the data is collected, the limitations to data, the appropriate selections for your campaign – and give clients help and advice.
“For me, the larger companies just want a sale , whereas we are in the business of building relationships ensuring people come back to us – we don’t do ‘sell and forget’.”
In these days when nearly every company has numerous touchpoints – all gathering personal information – many businesses are amassing customer data faster than they know what to do with it.
This has, of course, triggered the phenomenon of ‘big data’, as software vendors jump on the bandwagon much like the old CRM vendors did back in the Nineties.
Yet this has yet to trickle down to data management companies. Stevens said: “Working across both B2B and B2C we have seen a slight shift back towards postal data over the past 12 months and still have a high demand for email. There’s also a heavy reliance on cold data both for cold acquisition and for enhancing customer databases, with certain sectors, most notably charities, relying more heavily on external data than others.”
Of course, just like print firms have evolved, list management companies have had to adapt to change, providing more add-on services and data enhancements. But even so, it seems there’s plenty of life in the old dog yet…
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