While the baseball community is gearing up for its annual winter meetings, the direct marketing community has already conducted its own. What follows is a synopsis of major personnel changes as vendors and marketers made moves to strengthen their benches, as well as speculation on how this changes the industry competitive landscape.
Day 1: Friday, December 5, 2003
As rumored, River 161 Agency president Laszio Lowenstein fired Joe Yule Jr., his manager of direct marketing. (This marks the second time Yule has been fired by Lowenstein. And this time it’s for real. Or at least as real as any soap opera marriage.)
Vincent Furnier was traded from A/C Lists to list firm The Billion Dollar Baby Group “for a broker to be nth-named later,” according to a company statement. (How does one even consider replacing Furnier, a topnotch producer, with a randomly selected manager? His removal will leave holes in the A/C lineup: Lifetime 175% ROI for his list suggestions, 3,142 lists placed, 229 stolen clients – which is staggering, considering he was NOT in the new business development segment.)
Lawrence Tero narrowly missed being awarded 2003’s “American Telemarketer of the Year” Award after three voters left him off the ballot for basing his main call center in India. “You find me a United States-based telemarketing firm whose reps are cordial enough to deal with [nonsense] from American consumers,” Tero said. (Several of Tero’s key performers either declared free agency or requested trades after that outburst. While he didn’t make many moves during the winter meetings, look for more before the year is out.)
Day 2: Saturday, December 6, 2003
George Alan O’Dowd has been demoted to manager of wrapper technology at packaged goods firm D’Abruzzo and Son. O’Dowd, who had previously been director of customer relationship management, spent $250,000 on a pre-teen focused mail campaign for Spread-Umms peanut butter cups that netted a 0.13% response rate. “I told him marketing to kids was tricky, and that we have to send stuff to their parents,” said candy patriarch Alphonso D’Abruzzo. “The idiot sent out half a million pieces addressed ‘To the PATIENTS of’ those little brats on the list we rented. (Hope D’Abruzzo saves the names of those that did respond: a database of nine-year-old internists could prove massively valuable someday.)
River 161 Agency president Laszio Lowenstein hired Joe Yule Jr. to serve as the firm’s manager of direct marketing. (Ladies and gentlemen, Laszio Lowenstein and Joe Yule Jr., the direct marketing’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton!)
Lucille Le Sueur, who was offered a manager’s position in PacifiCall’s outbound call center, has elected to retire. Said Le Sueur in a statement, “Having evaluated the long-term viability of jobs in outbound telemarketing, I’ve decided to take my chances in a more stable industry, such as the Sri Lankan space program.” (Curmudgeon? Perhaps. Successful? Absolutely. Le Sueur is only the sixth cross-handed dialer to participate in 300 profitable campaigns. Any bets on the DMA Hall of Fame?)
Day 3: Sunday, December 7, 2003
Benjamin Kubelsky was placed on the 60-day disabled list after spraining his wrist during a spreadsheet-related mishap. Kubelsky had been calculating the losses on his Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce campaign, “Please Try Sin City Again: We’re No Longer Posing As Family Friendly.” (Kubelsky is perhaps the least graceful marketer to toy with the English language. Kubelsky once spent 15 minutes bawling out a junior analyst who he felt wasn’t a team player, only to undercut his own tirade by ending it with “And remember, there’s no ‘I’ in ROI.”)
Online agency DigiBux traded veteran creative director Caryn Johnson to online agency WebCents for rookie copywriters Mary Cathleen Collins and Elias Bates. Johnson’s business-to-business banner ad campaign, “Buy our products or we tell your boss where you’ve been surfing,” pulled a 22.6% sales rate, while the last banner ads by Collins and Bates pulled 5.4% and 4.1%, respectively. “We wanted to get some up-and-coming talent into our shop, and saw this as a good opportunity to do so,” said Ernest Evans, vice president of client services at Cheyenne, WY-based DigiBux. (Evans can talk about new talent all he wants: This was a chance to get something of value before Johnson left of her own accord. With his shop located in Wyoming, the only thing Evans could pay her with would be stock options – which might be worth something if his business ever got around to going public – and desert-bleached cattle skulls.)
Citing philosophic differences, River 161 Agency president Laszio Lowenstein released Joe Yule Jr. Yule had most recently been the company’s manager of direct marketing. (I wonder if his cubicle has a revolving door?)
To respond to this column, please contact rlevey@primediabusiness.com
