Meet the Brokers: Amy Benicewicz
Welcome to the first in a series of Listline broker profiles.
Today we meet Amy Benicewicz, who works from her home office in New Fairfield, CT, for Media Source Solutions Inc. as vice president of list brokerage, insert media and database licensing.
Benicewicz worked in accounting and finance before she landing her first job in direct marketing in 1994 at Mal Dunn Associates Inc., where she worked in list management. Then she moved on to Novis Marketing and the Catamount Group, where she got her start in list brokerage. “Because it’s a small company, we did both brokerage and management,” said Benicewicz, who now spearheads Media Source Solutions’ new list brokerage division.
She has two sons, ages 7 and 10, and recently started playing golf and tennis. Benicewicz has also tried a more daring sport, skydiving, successfully jumping from 10 planes.
Do you have a specialty?
“I’m more of generalist,” said Benicewicz. During her career she has provided direct marketing services for Discover Card, Cigars International, Reader’s Digest and the National Wildlife Federation, among other organizations. She continues to provide brokerage services for a credit card company and another business-to-business direct marketer. Her focus has been on list brokerage for direct mail promotions. She aims to do more brokerage work for e-mail and telemarketing.
What’s the biggest challenge facing the industry?
Some of the biggest challenges involve keeping up with clients’ strategies and changes in the list marketplace, Benicewicz said. To her, this means staying current with trends and keeping clients informed of what other companies are doing in the same market category. One of her clients recently switched to a private database environment, seeking to lease data for long-term use for list modeling in order to create customized lists in-house, rather than renting individual lists. This kind of arrangement is a common practice in business-to-business marketing. But accessing data this way for consumer marketing takes lots of explaining to list owners and users alike. “Time will tell how well this method works for consumer marketing,” she said.
Can you share a recent interesting brokerage deal?
One of Benicewicz’s clients wanted to increase the volume of outbound e-mail messages used to generate attendees for a webinar, while lowering the list cost. The solution was to switch to lower cost e-mail master file lists, which enabled the client to increase e-mail circulation fourfold. “It was exciting because they were able to do this while spending quite a bit less,” Benicewicz said.
Have someone you’d like to suggest for Meet the Brokers? E-mail Jim Emerson at [email protected].
