Meet the Broker: Tracy Olley

Today we meet Tracy Olley, who does list brokerage for nonprofit organizations and companies in Canada and the U.S. She telecommutes from her home office in British Columbia for New Jersey-based Information Refinery Inc.

After serving many years as general manager for a golf course, Olley made a midlife career change to become a list broker. “I was always interested in marketing,” she said.

She got her start with the list brokerage firm Prospects Influential Inc. in Vancouver, BC, where she worked for about seven years, before she joined Information Refinery in October.

She currently does list brokerage primarily for nonprofit organizations, but she’s done brokerage for consumer and business-to-business marketers. “Probably 65% of my clients are U.S. based,” said Olley.

Her clients include public TV stations such as British Columbia-based Knowledge Network. Olley also does list brokerage for the University of California at San Francisco and the University of South Alabama, involving their medical research programs.

Olley is married and has three teenage daughters. An 8-month old Labrador Retriever is the latest addition to the family. For recreation, Olley enjoys snow and water skiing and ocean fishing for salmon. “I enjoy the fight a salmon gives compared to a trout.”

Olley recently gave up kickboxing for a new hobby, martial arts, which she and her husband are learning together. “It’s a great stress reliever and it’s better than punching him,” she said.

How do the U.S. and Canadian list markets compare?

“There’s so much more information available in the U.S., so many more options and levels of detail for consumer and business-to-business lists,” said Olley.

From her perspective, U.S. marketers are more aggressive and test more lists than Canadian marketers. The minimum size list rental is Canada is 1,000 names, while in the U.S. a 5,000-name minimum is more common.

“It’s not as big a deal when a test list doesn’t work for a U.S. company because they’ll try something else,” Ollie said.

Privacy laws in Canada are more restrictive compared to the U.S., noted Olley. “You cannot get household level information in Canada, like marital status or presence of children.”

In absence of specific household data, marketers trying to target Canadian families with children must make assumptions and “guesstimate” based on such factors as the size of single-family dwellings and income. Statistical modeling and enhanced lists are less common in Canada than in the U.S., due to cost considerations, Olley added.

Supply and demand for business-to-business lists in Canada has been growing faster than for consumer lists. This demand is particularly strong for lists identifying professionals involved in information technology and human resources, she said.

What kind of clients do you enjoy working with most and why?

“It’s the nonprofits that get my adrenaline going the most,” Olley said. “Quite often they’ll be using 10 to 15 lists and I’m on a deadline to get everything organized.”

Nonprofit organizations typically operate with longer-term marketing plans and budgets, with more specific goals, compared to consumer and business-to-business mailers, which is why Olley finds nonprofits more challenging.

Another factor is that nonprofits generally focus more on building marketing databases, while commercial mailers tend focus more on generating sales in the short term.

With nonprofit organizations, a half dozen or more people may be are involved in the planning and decision-making process, but with commercial mailers a broker may only have an opportunity to work with the business owner or one key executive, even when many lists are involved, she said.

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