Meet the Broker: Jennifer Cuttler
Today we meet Jennifer Cuttler, senior vice president of sales at Direct Media Inc. Cuttler landed on her feet in Sept. 2001 at Direct Media, after the World Trade Center disaster.
Cuttler had spent 12 years with Uni-Mail List Corp. Then the attacks on the Twin Towers, just four blocks away, rendered Uni-Mail’s offices inoperable and the company closed.
She joined Uni-Mail in 1990 as an account executive, moved up to vice president and then she became a partner in 1997.
Her first experience in the list business was a summer job at Action List Services while she was still in high school. “I went away to college (receiving a B.A. in marketing from Binghamton University, NY) and I came back to the list business,” says Cuttler.
Earlier in her career, she brokered lists mainly for direct mail sweepstakes, but her expertise expanded to include continuity marketing, publishing and catalogs. She was forced to diversify further when the sweepstakes market contracted in the late 1990s and that business all but dried up. “Some of my clients reinvented themselves,” she adds.
Cuttler now primarily works with catalogers, publishers and general merchandise direct marketers. Her clients include Gerber Life Insurance Co., Fingerhut Direct Marketing Inc., Dream Products Inc., Chef’s Catalog, Golf Digest and Fortune magazines.
“I’ve been with most of my clients for five-plus years, says Cuttler. It’s important to be intimate with a client’s history, where they’ve been, where they are now and where they want to be going.”
She’s married and has nine-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. She enjoys skiing. She spends most weekends socializing with friends or engaged in family activities. “When I’m not working I spend a lot of time schlepping the kids to sports and other activities,” she adds.
How has the Graham Leach Bliley Act affected the list business?
It governs how personally identifiable financial data is collected and disclosed. It requires financial institutions to provide consumers with notices about how to opt out of having such information shared.
Some financial information is no longer easily accessible and it has affected how major credit databases are being built, according to Cuttler.
Certain financial data cannot be organized for targeting down to the household level, but targeting down to the ZIP+4 level is an alternative strategy, she says.
Brokers have had to look for creative ways to adapt, which includes using more list selections and more refined database segmentation.
“It has affected my clients because we have to follow these guidelines, Cuttler says. It’s harder to make some lists work: some lists don’t respond the way they used to,” she adds.
How do mailers cope with shrinking response list universes?
Most of the companies that Cuttler works with rely on statistical modeling and other methods for optimizing data to expand the available universe of names.
“Data analytics really have come a long way in the last 10 years,” she says.
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