Today we meet Claire Carpenter, a list broker at Carney Direct.
She joined the firm seven months ago, and was previously vice president of list brokerage at Direct Media (now Direct Media Millard) for five years. Prior to that, she was senior vice president of list brokerage for 21st Century Marketing, now part of Specialists Marketing Services.
In her current role, she brokers a wide range of business-to-business, consumer and e-mail lists.
One of the largest changes she’s seen in her 20-year career is a more pronounced movement toward database marketing and analytics. The role of the list broker has changed as well.
“Years ago, we would just do list brokerage and recommend files for our mailers,” Carpenter says. “Now we have to be the research person, specialize and offer value-added services.”
Part of the reason for this is because of shrinkage in the overall list universe.
“Years ago, lists would come on the market [at the rate of] five new lists a week,” she says. “Now we’re lucky if we see five truly new good lists a year. As list brokers we have to decipher through what is really new to the market or just kind of recycled under another name.”
Naturally, the recession has hit the business. But Carpenter sees signs of hope.
“You ‘re now seeing mailers starting to forge back into the mail, realizing that they need to in order for their businesses to run,” she says. “So especially with the start of 2010, we’re slowly treading back.”
Off the job, Carpenter lives in Stony Brook, NY with her two daughters, ages eight and six. How does she occupy her time? If you have kids, you know the answer. “I’m doing whatever they force me to do,” she says.
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