Meet the Broker: Mike Manning, Manning Media International
Today we meet Mike Manning, president of Manning Media International (MMI), McKinney, TX. Manning’s notion of geographic list selection is greater than state/SCF/ZIP. It’s no wonder because he specializes in international lists.
Manning does list brokerage primarily in the airline, high-tech, pharmaceutical and publishing industries. His clients include American Airlines and the Harvard Business Review.
“I used to do a lot more brokerage for consumer catalogs,” he says, noting that more catalog business is now conducted online.
Of late, he’s been watching the role of catalogs shift more towards generating online traffic and orders, which means e-mail marketing opportunities for brokers have grown. About 40% of his business comes from e-mail lists, with the rest mostly from postal and telemarketing lists.
Manning has been practicing list brokerage more than 20 years. His first list broker job was in the United Kingdom. After immigrating to the U.S., he worked for AllMedia Inc., prior to founding MMI in 1998.
His brokerage experience has come full circle. He started out doing business-to-business brokerage. While he was with AllMedia he dealt with consumer lists.
“It’s swinging more to business-to-business again because the order values are higher,” says Manning, who notes demand is greater for international B-to-B lists than international consumer lists. Higher average B-to-B orders sway more companies to market internationally.
Manning explains demand has diminished in recent years for international postal and fax lists, while it has grown for international e-mail and telemarketing lists.
More companies are doing international marketing research, which is creating new demand for e-mail and telemarketing lists used for surveying consumers.
“Quite a lot of companies are using data to get people to respond to surveys and ascertain attitudes and behavior concerning products and services,” he says.
Besides lists and data, Manning’s other passion is rugby. He’s married and has son, 17, and a daughter, 16. He travels internationally to watch rugby matches
