Meet the Broker: Michelle Brown

Today we meet Michelle Brown, a Boulder, CO-based senior account executive at Walter Karl Inc. Brown was one of the principals with The List Group for six years, but she gave that up to join Walter Karl three years ago. “I had to run operations but I wanted work more closely with clients,” said Brown.

Earlier in her career, she worked for List Emporium and a seminar company, where she was in charge of selling lists to brokers and mailers.

Most of her work comes through agencies. She does list brokerage for retailers, fitness centers, catalogers, information technology publications, employment services and firms in the telecommunications industry.

Michelle is married and has lived in Boulder for most of her life. She is an alumna of Colorado University.

“I’m a very outdoorsy person. I’m not very domestic. I don’t garden or cook. My husband does all that,” she said. “When I’m not brokering, I’m on my mountain bike, road bike or downhill skiing in the winter.”

Vacations usually include biking. She has traveled to Washington State to ride trails on Mount Rainier, and couldn’t resist riding along part of the Tour de France route when she visited France.

On Thursday evenings, she and a dozen or so of her neighbors meet for a bike ride. “We call ourselves the Sleazy Riders, because our route takes us to a bar,” said Brown. “After we get our exercise we have a cocktail.”

What challenges do you see facing the list business?

“One of the challenges I see that keeps coming up involves e-mail,” Brown said.

Sensitivity over spam continues to plague e-mail list owners and users. In her opinion Can-Spam regulations are helping, but more needs to done to keep spam from crowding out sanctioned e-mail.

“I think regulation has done some good, but we’re still seeing problems coming up,” she said.

The fledging e-mail list market has parallels with the established postal list rental market. Service bureaus serving as “neutral scrubbers” improve data security for list owners and the quality of e-mail lists, she said.

E-mail list quantities have been reduced but that’s good because opt-out names and duplicates are being removed through merge purge, which is something that didn’t happen prior to Can Spam, she said.

Brown said the market for e-mail list rentals would improve further if net name arrangements for e-mail files became a standard practice, as it already is for postal lists.

Can you share a recent interesting brokerage deal?

Brown said one client overcame the dilemma of flat response rates and rising costs with a statistical model using prospecting lists, which resulted in an increased order size generated from normally less productive 7- to 12-month names.

This scenario was unusual because “demographic optimization” modeling normally had been used only in connection with cooperative databases, not prospecting lists, she said.

The negotiated pricing resulted in increased prospecting list rental volume without wasting the mailer’s money on poor responding names, according to Brown.

“It was a careful balancing act to save money on the names that were actually going to be used,” she said.

All the available 7- to 12-month names were ordered from the list managers involved to create a model, enabling the mailer to score and subsequently mail only to those top scored names.

Know someone you’d like to suggest for Meet the Broker? E-mail Jim Emerson at [email protected]