Today we meet Randi Morris, executive vice president of the interactive division of Specialist Marketing Services in Boca Raton, FL. Through her nine years in the industry, she's seen interactive marketing evolve from a wild-west scene into a recognized legitimate medium—and one which already seems to be climbing out of the recession.
"From December through February, it was soft but it has gone unbelievably well this last quarter and we see it continuing," she says.
She's held her current post for two years. Before that, she worked at list management/brokerage firm Teramedia and earlier at Opt-in Inc., an online marketing services firm.
She brokers lists in the automotive, fast food, catalog and telecommunications industries, working heavily in the interactive and multichannel space.
What's most interesting, Morris says, is how much interactive marketing has changed since she got into it. "I could talk to you about that all day long," she says.
"When I first started out nine years ago, there weren't a lot of players in the industry so the open and click rates were very strong," she says. "There was no cannibalism, there were no CPA (cost per acquisition) deals.
"About three years after I got into the space it became a frenzy and a free-for-all," she continues. "It was like it became this wild, wild, west arena and everybody was doing things they shouldn't have been: databases were getting flip-flopped, people were stealing data—it was very ugly."
On top of that, there was a bit of resistance from traditional direct marketers to this newfangled way of doing things, she recalls.
"Nine years ago, I always tried to get the catalogers from the interactive side and from the direct mail side to interact and they would never merge together," she says.
She cites upscale home goods retailers as a case in point.
"Their marketing efforts were never integrated--they were always segregated," Morris says. "The postal would some from one side, the TV ads from one spot and interactive from one spot."
Today, things are changing, she says. "I'm starting to see that they're integrating everything in a lot of multichannel efforts and that the budgets are becoming connected versus singular so that's really helped the space."
Another area for which she brokers lists is mobile marketing and text messaging.
"We work in fast food a lot and what you'll see is [major chains] utilizing an e-mail drop with a text message follow-up," she says. "It's very heavily into 18 to 24."
She concedes that mobile is still in its beginning stages.
"There are quite a few [mobile lists available] but anyone who's gonna utilize that medium has got to be very selective," Morris says. "There are a lot of people who are putting their toes in this water but not actually utilizing it yet.
"People are really inquiring and trying to understand the space," she continues. "There's plenty of data out there to utilize the medium but it's not being used to its capacity yet and you'll see a shift in the next 15 to 24 months depending on the economy and everything else."
Overall, Morris is optimistic the recovery she's starting to see in the interactive space will sustain.
When not brokering lists, Morris is busy raising her two teenage sons and taking them taking them wakeboarding and boating from her home in Boca Raton.
