Today we meet Jeff Bisset, president of London, Ontario's Interact Direct Marketing Inc., a business he owns with partner Paul Jensen. A relative newcomer to list brokerage, he sees lots of potential in the field despite the more restrictive landscape in Canada.
Interact has been in business since 1993 as a database services provider, but just recently began making forays into list brokerage. This past September, Interact released its 12-million-record file of all Canadian consumers compiled from telephone directories. Next month, the firm will unveil its first-ever file of 1.4 million Canadian businesses taken from the same sources.
"My background is actually as a database specialist and I was in the software business working with database projects—I learned about marketing databases from a major agricultural client, DuPont," says Bisset, who had previously owned software development companies. "And in 1993 we built their first Canadian marketing database, and got into the data processing, hygiene and management business from there."
Unlike in the overcrowded U.S. list market, Interact is competing only with major Canadian players such as Cornerstone Group of Cos. and Info Canada, InfoUSA's Canadian branch.
"It is a competitive market but we don't think it's overcrowded," says Bisset.
As is well known, the Canadian market is not so glutted because the atmosphere is a bit different.
"Probably the biggest thing is that the government in Canada at all levels doesn't make any data available so there's no drivers' license data, no birth certificates or marriage data made available," he says.
On top of that, there's the personal information protection and electronic documents act (PIPEDA) which, since 2001, has made every type of list opt-in.
Nevertheless, Bisset still sees opportunities in the list business.
"We expanded into lists because we found that the quality of the existing lists in Canada was not as good as it could be," he says. "And we saw an opportunity to integrate the lists with some of our other services like analysis and hygiene services."
That side of Interact's business right now is doing okay despite the recession.
"Data management has been a big growth area for us," he says. "We're seeing a lot of organizations wanting to outsource.
"We're finding that through this recession, companies have laid off and terminated so many jobs that they don't have any resources to do anything right now and the people who are left are basically project managers who are outsourcing everything," he says.
At his home near Toronto, Bisset, a single father, is raising two teenage boys and one teenage girl and also enjoys snowmobile and speedboat racing.
