The Chicago Association for Direct Marketing wrapped its annual DM Days and Expo meeting by awarding the title of 2005 Charles S. Downs Direct Marketer of the Year to Susan Kryl, a 40-year alumna of the Chicago DM scene and current president of Kryl & Co., a full-service direct marketing agency she founded in 1993.
In making the award—the third one to a woman executive in the 25-year history of the Downs prize—CADM past president Kelly Abeles said that Kryl had earned the title both for her impact on the national DM landscape over her career and for instilling the belief, both through her actions and her example, that “direct marketing is a calling that achieves results and deserves respect.”
Kryl’s acceptance speech harkened back to her early days in Chicago direct marketing, under the tutelage of Chicago catalog pioneer Maxwell Sroge. She recalled that her first job at Sroge’s company in 1967 was to sell Bell & Howell movie camera packages for $199.95, with a free trial and an easy payment plan for buyers. “Doesn’t that have a musty ring to it today?” she remarked.
Sroge was the first of many mentors Kryl said she benefited from over the course of her career, first as vice president and media director at Sroge, then in 1982 as the first female direct marketing head at J. Walter Thompson and eventually as founder, senior vice president and general manager of its Direct Midwest division.
Kryl joined with the late Gail Chrystal to found the Chrystal & Kryl agency in 1989 and set up Kryl & Co. in 1993. From 1989 to 1999, she also taught campaign planning at DePaul University, under that school’s direct marketing certificate program. There she introduced the notion of assigning her students to work with Chicago area non-profits as “living case studies”. The technique is still used in the program, and many of those students, Kryl said, have gone to work for their non-profit hosts after earning their certificates.
Asked in an interview what changes she would point to in the direct marketing industry, Kryl identified the rise of technology, from e-mail and the Internet to the spread of cable television and narrow casting. Those technological changes have changed consumers, and raised their expectations from marketers. “You can’t make people buy one certain way now,” she said. “They will buy the way they want to buy. A lot of catalog companies today mail catalogs, but then take their orders online. Marketers have to work to figure out what their integrated equation is.”
The Downs Award is named for the late Charles S. Downs, advertising director of Abbott Laboratories, a founder of CADM and its first president from 1955 to 1956. The award is given to current or former members who have distinguished themselves with direct marketing innovations, guidance to colleagues, and civic and charitable works.
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