Meet the Broker: Chris Mayka
Today we meet Chris Mayka, director of list brokerage at Atlantic List Co. He switches back and forth every two weeks from working at home in Vermont to working at corporate headquarters in Arlington, VA.
“I like to travel. I enjoy country living and also the schizophrenia of city living,” Mayka said. “So you might say I’m happy leading a double life.”
Before joining Atlantic nearly two years ago, Mayka spent about 20 years working for Direct Communications Corp. in Vermont. He found himself in the list business after he tried unsuccessfully to sell a photocopy machine to Direct Communications. Instead, they offered him a job.
“I started out doing consulting work and bringing in new clients, but the way we were paid was by getting commissions for list brokerage and management,” said Mayka.
Most of his brokerage experience has been with publishers and nonprofit organizations. His clients include Ode Magazine, Funny Times, E Magazine, Calvary Hospital, Actors’ Fund of America, American Poetry Review and Scripps Health.
Mayka said technological innovations would continue to change list brokerage. He believes the practice of renting individual lists for mailings will one day be superseded by renting lists almost exclusively for building statistical models for targeting offers.
The future of direct marketing, he feels, will be defined by increased modeling capability, and improvements in models built with data from cooperative databases such as Abacus and Target.
“Technology will catch up with the hype we’ve been hearing about for years. The future lies in e-mail and list modeling,” he said.
When he’s not working, Mayka’s fun time pursuits include bicycling, sailing and reading about American history
