Meet the Broker: Patrick Patten

Today we meet Patrick Patten, vice president of list brokerage at Statlistics in the Ventura, CA office. Patten is a seasoned broker and direct marketer who has sourced postal lists in many categories over the years.

He has worked with lists on the brokerage or client side for more than 30 years. “I’m hesitant to say that I’m old school, but I am definitely old school,” says Patten.

He started out working in the personnel department at Fingerhut in the 1970s, before becoming an in-house list manager.

Patten takes pride in calling himself as a generalist. Over the years he has dealt with clients in mail order, publishing and insurance, consumer catalogers and in more recent years business-to-business catalogers.

“Let’s face it, like anyone who has been around long enough, I’ve worked with whatever clients I ended up finding,” says Patten.

He joined Alan Drey Co. as a list broker in 1978. He left to serve as director of marketing at Harbor Freight Tools for five years. He rejoined Alan Drey in 1989 to launch a West Coast office, a Drey subsidiary called ADC Marketing Services Inc.

He was president at Alan Drey when the company closed during the summer of 2002. Soon afterwards he joined Statlistics to reestablish himself as a list broker.

“I had to start over again. I wasn’t doing much brokerage when I was president. I was down to working with two or three brokerage accounts then,” he recalls.

Patten currently sources lists for clients in the alternative health, music, seminars and various catalog markets. His brokerage clients include Harbor Freight Tools, the uniform company Quartermaster Inc., Musician’s Friend Inc. and R-Garden Inc. He also brokers lists for agencies and lettershops.

Patten is married, has adult children and an 18-month old grandson. He enjoys spending most of his spare time engaged in family activities. He plays golf for exercise.

Besides finding highly effective lists, how else can experienced brokers make money for clients?

“We can protect clients from making mailing mistakes. We know the big picture and we’ve seen all the different kinds of mistakes that can be made,” says Patten.

A good broker can spot problems on merge purge reports and intervene to save clients money. For example, if the duplication rate on reports show up expectedly high it’s possible that the wrong lists were delivered.

“The worst story I ever heard is when a digit was dropped from the address, which would have made the mail undeliverable,” he adds.

What’s your opinion of compiled lists?

“Compiled lists have come a long way since I first came into this business,” Patten says.

The quality of compiled data has improved compared to what was available years ago, like when motor vehicle records could be used for lists.

Nowadays most compiled lists are blended from multiple sources and thanks to the Internet more selections are available for better targeting, he continues.

Compiled list sources have become more important, due to the fact that the universe of response lists has been shrinking in recent years.

Probably 25% of the lists he recommends are compiled, he adds.

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