Today we meet Melissa Marchetta, senior account manager at All That Marketing, who works out of her home office in Phoenix, AZ. A 27-year industry veteran mostly with the now-defunct Names and Addresses Inc., she still sees service as the most important component of her job.
Currently, she brokers lists for publishers such as F&W Media, Affinity Group and Paul Oxman Publishing, as well catalogers like as Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland and collectibles direct marketers like America Remembers.
When she started out at Names & Addresses, she was an assistant to company part-owner Phil Staples, who was brokering lists.
“One day about nine years ago he just kind of told me ‘you know what, do this on your own,’ ” she recalls. “I always say he kicked me out of the nest. I was very happy doing what I was doing but then I became a broker and I’ve been doing that all these years.”
Naturally, the industry has changed a good deal since those early days.
“Mailers have had to get much more selective with the files they are using,” she says, noting that negotiation has become even more essential to brokering lists.
Another challenge for cataloger clients is the growth over the last four or five years of multi-million-name databases, which she says she approaches very carefully.
“You don’t even know how these databases were put together,” she says. “There are too many unknowns.”
And that’s coupled with a lack of newly available catalog files to rent, she notes.
“So it is a tougher market,” she says. “There are a number of my mailers that have really cut back. So it is a challenge to find something new but I think it goes with thinking outside the box and coming up with some new ideas.”
Part of that includes exploring alternative media such as blow-in cards and e-mail. Marchetta’s hoping these strategies will enable her clients to ride out the current recession and come out stronger when it’s over.
When not brokering lists, Marchetta enjoys spending time with her husband and two golden retrievers in her home in Phoenix where she’s lived for six years.
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