Meet the Broker: Tricia Fleming

Today we meet Tricia Fleming, vice president of list brokerage at Mokrynskidirect. Fleming planned to pursue a career in advertising in New York, but decided to give list management a try because the commute was shorter. It was a happy discovery, because she found she really liked working with lists.

She’s been with Mokrynskidirect for 20 years now. After working nine years managing consumer and business-to-business files, Fleming switched to list brokerage. Now she works exclusively with consumer mailers.

“I work mainly in the teen market,” said Fleming. Her clients in this sector include Alloy, CCS and Tilly’s.

She has clients in other categories too and does lots of work with companies involving cooperative databases. Her other clients include the B.A. Mason shoe and ESPN Shop catalogs.

Fleming is single and in her free time enjoys socializing with friends and family, dining out or attending baseball games with nieces and nephews.

She travels to Florida whenever she can during winter to visit her parents and escape the cold. At home she spoils her Brussells Griffon dog. “He rules the house, not me.”

How will the upcoming postage increase affect list brokers?

“It’s a big issue. A few months ago mailers were budgeting for a smaller increase. It’s a double whammy for companies that also use the post office for shipping packages,” Fleming said.

Historically, postage increases have been followed by cyclical cutbacks in test and continuation mailings, which quickly shrinks available list counts and sources for new names.

This means brokers will need to focus more on circulation planning. “We need to see which lists are performing marginally and what we can do to make them work better, before cutting any out,” she said.

Data enhancements and statistical modeling can increase response rates for standalone lists, but lists of names derived from cooperative databases typically generate higher response rates, she added.

Fleming said she anticipates the impact on cooperative databases will be less noticeable than on individual response lists. That’s because an increasing amount of data being sourced for co-ops from the Internet is available for statistical modeling and other enhancements.

Mailers shouldn’t overlook compiled lists either, she added, noting these generally perform better when they are overlaid with demographic selections such as age or income.

What keeps list brokerage exciting for you?

“I like the challenges, especially the changes over the last three years related to the Internet, she said. “It’s not just about mailing catalogs any more.”

More companies are beginning to do Internet data matchbacks to determine the original source for orders, which enables them to use e-mail to support catalogs, Fleming said.

Demand for e-mail list rentals is increasing among catalogers faster than the supply of catalog-generated e-mail files, which encourages catalogers to consider other outside e-mail list sources.

Business-to-business catalogers use more e-mail lists, but consumer catalogers are increasingly appending e-mail addresses to house files, she said.

Keenly aware of all those teenagers tapping out text messages to each other and who are opting in to receive messages, Fleming anticipates a new market for text-messaging lists will emerge. “Text-messaging is where e-mail was a few years ago. It’s where our industry is heading.”

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