Today we meet Michael Fishman, vice president of the list brokerage division at Specialists Marketing Services Inc., Weehawken, NJ.
In 1979, when Fishman was a student at the University of Binghamton, NY, he didn’t realize his part-time job at Accredited Mailings Lists would lead him to a career in direct marketing. “I worked in the accounting department,” he said.
Newly minted from college, Fishman set out to pursue his passion for music as a freelance journalist, writing record reviews for various music industry magazines.
In 1984, he was hired as account executive at Dependable Lists. He’s stayed on ever since, through new owners and company name changes from Dependable to Specialists to ClientLogic and back to Specialists again. “I’m in the list business for 22 years and I’m only 46.”
Outside of work, Fishman enjoys a game of tennis. His passions are music, contemporary art and film. He has a daughter who just started college, and 15-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. He likes to spend time with his family and listen to music on weekends, especially jazz musician Pat Methney.
Do you have a specialty?
“Yes. I’ve helped a lot of magazine and book publishers,” Fishman said.
He mostly works on accounts involving health products, personal finance and other financial services. “Of these three areas, I probably work most in the health market.”
Over the years, Fishman has done extensive brokerage work for publishers Rodale and Boardroom. More recently he’s been working with Reader’s Digest and Meredith Corp. He’s heavily involved with list prospecting for Meredith’s new Heart Healthy Living and Diabetic Living magazines.
Fishman founded and facilitates the Consumer Health Summit, an annual meeting Specialists sponsors for publishers and other companies that mail to this sector.
Aside from brokerage work, Fishman keeps a hand in the list management side of the business and provides consulting services. Success in brokerage means becoming part of the clients’ team, not just selling something. “You have to show clients what they don’t already know,” he said.
Can you share a recent interesting brokerage deal?
“We had one client put out 20 million names for one campaign,” Fishman said. But even much smaller campaigns in the health sector are challenging because of severe list fatigue and market saturation.
To succeed you must also mail to out-of-category lists to get away from all the “incestuous lists” in the health market that everyone is using, he noted.
In a given market, normally hotline names generate the best response, but in the health sector there’s so much competition that older names will often perform better than newer hotline names, Fishman said.
Age, he said, is of course a key selection in the health products market, but mastery of consumer behavior and knowledge of transaction history yields better results when choosing lists. And a catalog buyer is not necessarily a good prospect for a direct mail offer unless that person has something in their transaction history to indicate they’ll open a direct mail piece.
Likewise, it’s important to use brand name lists to reach consumers who typically only respond to offers from brand name companies, and to identify consumers who will open direct mail even from an unknown company, he said.
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