Meet the Broker: Tom Palmese

Today we meet Tom Palmese, vice president, business development, at Mazzone Marketing Group in Brooklyn, NY, where he’s worked since last November.

A more than 18-year industry veteran, he believes that despite the growth of such new media as social marketing and texting, sound direct marketing boils down to data. This is a lesson he says he learned from his first job at Getting to Know You, now the Welcome Wagon.

“When I first started in this industry, I worked for a compiler of new homeowner data and it was the best experience,” he says. “The value that I got out of that position and the reason why I stayed eight years at that company was data–everything boils back to data.

“There are a lot more channels out there now that we have to test, but it all comes down to the core principals of marketing: The customer and prospect determine how they want to communicate with us,” he notes.

Over the years, Palmese has also worked at Rickard List Marketing, L.I.S.T. Inc. Between 2006 and 2008 ran his own firm, Palmese Direct Marketing, where he provided outsourced marking services to other companies.

At Mazzone, Palmese brokers a wide range of business-to-business postal and e-mail lists and also works with agencies, printers and technology companies.

So how has the industry changed since he began?

“As brokers, we work harder for less,” he says. “There’s no downtime anymore. Technology is such that no longer is it 24 hours or 48 hours for a list count. Generally it has to be that day.”

Naturally, the current economic slump is affecting business.

“We’re the first to be affected because we’re marketers, but then we’re the first ones to rebound when people start feeling good about themselves and start spending, and marketing dollars will follow.”

But such conditions can also sometimes bring about unexpected changes.

“I find that in hard times, it’s easier to get list owners to think outside the box,” he says. “We just brought in a new list management property. It’s in the information technology space and three to five years ago they would never have considered doing a data append.”

Palmese lives in Merrick, NY with his wife (who he met back at Getting to Know You) and his seven-year-old daughter.