The DMA List & Database Council has named Linda Huntoon the 2008 List Leader of the Year. Huntoon, currently executive VP of brokerage at Direct Media, Inc., has also held positions at Walter Karl Inc. and SpeciaLISTS, now Specialists Marketing Services, Inc. She is past chair of the DMA List & Database Council, and a 2004 winner of the Silver Apple Award from the Direct Marketing Club of New York.
Huntoon counts her husband (Budge Huntoon, partner and CEO of Blue Hill Data Services) and Walter Karl as her earliest and most significant influences. It was her husband who, when Huntoon was first looking for a job in the early 1980s, assured her she would be able to land a position, and that she’d be better than the average employee once she did.
Walter Karl echoed this sentiment during a three-hour initial interview after Huntoon responded to a help wanted listing. “I found [Walter Karl’s] ad for someone with good phone skills in a local pennysaver,” Huntoon said. “[Karl] explained the whole list industry to me, starting with how Lou Kleid brokered names between Time and Life, before they were owned by the same company.”
When she went home after her interview, with a job offer in hand, her husband asked her what she’d be doing. “I don’t know, but Walter said I’d be good at it,” Huntoon told him.
Karl didn’t just share the list industry’s history with Huntoon, he brought her into it. “His training consisted of calling me into his office and handing me a copy of Yankee magazine,” she said. “He told me to pick three or four ads and choose lists for them.” Karl evaluated her suggestions, and set her loose.
In 1992, Huntoon joined SpeciaLISTS as president of its New York brokerage division. At SpeciaLISTS, CEO Lon Mandel taught her the science behind the list industry.
“When I was at Walter Karl, we never had anything to do with numbers,” Huntoon said. “I didn’t know what it took to make a dollar. I got the best names I could at the best cost. When I went to work for Lonnie, I didn’t know the metrics of this business.”
Rather than “picking me up and throwing me out,” Mandel tutored her in list industry economics. “I didn’t know that it cost [at the time] $23 to process every order, or to place a revision or a cancellation,” Huntoon said. But more than that, Mandel taught her “You cannot be successful at this business unless you understand your clients.”
In 2002, she joined Direct Media and began working for Dave Florence, the third industry leader who had a significant impact on her professional development. But she started learning from Florence long before he actually worked for him.
At another company “I was involved in a list management pitch for an account for which I was the exclusive broker,” Huntoon said. “We didn’t have the management business, and we wanted it. The list owner allowed us to do the pitch, and then promptly handed over the account – to Florence at Direct Media. When I asked [the list owner] why, he said ‘I have been having breakfast with Dave Florence once a year for 20 years.’
“Dave is the consummate fisherman,” Huntoon added. “He always trawls; he always has his line out.”
Asked about the biggest change between the list industry when she first started and now, Huntoon offered a standard response – the Web has provides new marketing channels, new list opportunities and new delivery mechanisms. But she also reflected on how the relationship between list clients and list professionals has changed.
“I can’t believe the number of clients who leave their circulation planning to their list brokers,” Huntoon said. “The people in charge are focused somewhere else – the mailers are no longer knee-deep in their business. They are knee-deep in their numbers. There are fewer and fewer mailers going to conferences, and they’re not sitting down with list owners and hammering out their differences.
“We have lost the entrepreneurs. These guys don’t lay in bed thinking about a better way of marketing their products; they lay in bed thinking about how they can justify their numbers for the next quarter. And it serves us very poorly.”
Any other differences between then and now? Yes, according to Huntoon, a physical one. “Back then we all kept rubber bands around our wrists to organize data cards within their shoeboxes, and our cuticles were all chewed up from going through the index cards.”
Huntoon will be honored at the List Leader of the Year Awards dinner, which will be held on June 9 at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers.
