Meet the Broker: Gary J. Martin

Today we meet Gary J. Martin, vice president of sales at Macromark Inc. Martin worked in sales and marketing for Verizon before he switched to list brokerage about 11 years ago.

Martin started his list career at Mal Dunn Associates Inc., now known as Dunn Data Co., where he concentrated on business-to-business lists for seven years.

He’s been working on both consumer and business-to-business accounts since he joined Macromark in December 2004. He deals mostly with postal lists and insert media, and to a lesser extent e-mail lists.

Martin’s brokerage clients include Carnival Cruise Lines, Chevron Corp., Cambridge Healthtech Institute, Nutrition Express Corp. and MemoMind Pharma.

“The most important thing a broker can offer to a client is to be a good listener and a good thinker,” says Martin. “The way to make money for a client is to uncover unseen opportunities.”

For example, when the Cambridge Healthtech Institute organized a scientific conference on Mad Cow Disease it planned to only target pharmaceutical industry professionals. But, he says, at his urging the institute decided to expand the target audience to include farmers.

Martin is married and his recreational interests include playing the acoustic and electric guitar and speed swimming. He also loves movies.

“I have home theater with 12 seats,” says Martin. “I guess you could call me a cinemaphile or videophile.”

How often do you recommend cooperative databases?

“I always recommend using the co-ops or testing them,” says Martin. “Small tests can be arranged without putting any names into the co-op.”

Some mailers hesitate to use co-ops because they have unnecessary fears of receiving duplicate names or somehow losing the names they contribute to a co-op in order to pull names out, according to Martin.

Rather than be afraid of co-ops, he says mailers should understand that response lists derived from co-op databases are less than expensive than individual list rentals, in addition to offering more lifestyle data for selection and statistical modeling.

“The beauty of co-ops is not just that the names are less expensive. The media to earnings ratio is higher, with better response, lower costs and higher profitability,” says Martin.

Do many mailers use cooperative databases?

Martin acknowledges that the most mailers still prefer renting individual lists, rather than participating in cooperative databases. But he believes this will change.

In another 10 to 20 years, he predicts the majority of individual lists all will be rolled into cooperative databases.

“I see a time coming when there are maybe just 10 huge cooperative databases on the market, where everyone goes to choose lists,” says Martin.

“People now talk a lot about the consolidation of list companies. What I see happening in the future is the consolidation of the lists themselves.”

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