Meet the Broker: Kathy Rakosky

Today we meet Kathy Rakosky, vice president at Zed Marketing Group in Edmond, OK, where she’s worked for 13 years since graduating from the University of Oklahoma.

She divides her time between brokering horticultural and other lists and insert media management, which she describes as “a completely different animal.”

She notes that between Septemer and December, she devotes about 30% of her time to horticultural lists.

Insert media management, however, keeps her busy all year.

The most noticeable development in the list brokerage industry since she’s been around is definitely the pace.

“Certainly things are a lot quicker, especially when we can e-mail an FTP file so quickly,” she says. “Obviously the electronic age has been a factor in making things a lot quicker.”

This can cause some problems.

“It’s easier to get answers and it takes less time to process things and it’s sometimes more difficult because some of the gardening people are just old-school and they don’t always answer things very quickly,” she concedes. “You’ve got three days to process a file but you can’t get the list owner to give you a yes or a no because he’s out in the field.”

On top of that, that’s there’s the dwindling supply of available new names. “Certainly we’re having to get more creative, I think, to find things to work,” she says.

Part of the challenge, she says, is trying to convince gardening catalogers—who’ve traditionally relied on renting lists from each other—to branch out and use other sources.

“A lot of them are starting to work with Wiland Direct or Abacus to try and find new names to mail,” she says.

Another problem facing gardening catalogers is competition from big box retailers, she notes.

Just the same, the economic downturn that’s affected so much of the direct marketing industry recently has actually benefited some of Zed’s fruit and vegetable cataloger clients, Rakosky says.

“Actually for the gardening industry, it’s been terrific because some people are trying to save money so they’re saying ‘let’s grow it ourselves,'” she says.

Widespread media attention on going green isn’t hurting this part of the business either, she says.

But she concedes that “the flower people are still kind of struggling along.”

When not working, Rakosky, who lives in Edmond, “is usually at the hockey rink” with her nine- and five-year-old sons.