Meet the Broker: Diane Widerstrom

Today we meet Diane Widerstrom, vice president of integrated services at Response Media. Widerstrom is a 50/50 broker. Half her work involves Internet media and half is traditional postal list brokerage.

Widerstrom started 20 years ago in direct marketing, working for a travel club. She joined Response Media as a broker in 1986. She left there in 1994 to work for a larger agency, Grizzard Communications Group Inc., only to return to Response Media few years later for an ongoing encore.

“I’ve been morphing over the last few years. I’ve learned to get more involved in the new types of online marketing programs out there,” she says.

Her online brokerage work involves lead generation programs, Web site co-registration and e-mail. Offline she works with postal lists and insert media programs.

Widerstrom does consumer brokerage work in financial services, fundraising and travel markets, among other areas. She does agency work for the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries International.

Clients she works with directly include Wachovia, CitiFinancial, AIG Private Client Group, Southern Methodist University, UJA-Federation of New York and Compass Knowledge Group.

Internet media is becoming increasingly attractive from a brokerage standpoint, as postage costs rise and the postal list universe generally contracts, with list counts declining and hotlines shrinking.

List managers have been calling her lately to inquire about clients’ plans for direct mail, but the bloom on that rose isn’t quite the same anymore. She sees the shift from advertising by mail to Internet media accelerating. “Last year was a terrible year for direct mail,” she adds.

Widerstrom envisages postal lists playing a smaller role in future direct marketing campaigns. “Don’t count on the future of postal lists if you like eating filet mignon instead of hot dogs,” Widerstrom says.

A new generation of marketers is focusing on the Internet. Companies are cutting direct mail budgets and ultimately that means fewer people are learning traditional direct mail media skills.

“The market has definitely matured. Direct mail is becoming a lost art. There isn’t a big pool of new talent coming into the industry like there was 20 years ago,” she says.

What’s life like besides work?

“I’m married and have an adult daughter and a 16-year-old son. Living in Florida, we love the beach and going to theme parks,” says Widerstrom.

Although she travels extensively for work, Widerstrom still enjoys personal trips, such a road trip to the Southwest last year. At home, she has come to expect and enjoys entertaining “many people” who like visiting the Sunshine State during the winter.

Is there much difference between postal and Internet media brokerage?

“The lingo is different but there are many principles that carry over to the online world,” Widerstrom says.

Pricing is based on clicks, whether it’s cost per lead, cost per thousand, “take (conversion) rates” or similar means. Brokers also need to understand how and where responses are routed online for collecting data.

“It’s more complicated for negotiating, but brokers love to negotiate so that’s not a problem,” she says.

Compared to postal lists, Internet media targeting is more limited to behavior and contextual based on what people read online, but the data can be enhanced. Much of the research for online brokerage involves checking Web traffic patterns, she adds.

Most online data is available through private deals, rather than being offered on an open market like postal lists. But getting information from the data owners is typically more time-consuming and difficult than dealing with conventional postal list managers, she says.

Brokers with direct marketing backgrounds have an advantage over newcomers in the online sector who don’t have years of experience working with and segmenting data, according to Widerstrom.

Widerstrom says she chuckled to herself at a recent interactive media conference when a neophyte speaker discussed “new” techniques for segmenting data by recency.

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