THERE ARE AS many ways of making a good list recommendation as there are loopholes in our tax laws. I have some real favorites, but the one that comes to mind is Annette Brodsky’s. Formerly the president of Accredited Lists, Annette was the world’s greatest expert on the top 250 lists in America. A data card for Fingerhut in front of her on a desk, her eyes would move across the card, stopping only if another revelatory smidgen of knowledge came into her mind as a virtually Talmudic insight.

And just as a Talmudic scholar will sometimes insist the Zohar reveals the sum total of human existence, all of Annette’s list recommendations came from those 250 lists. Occasionally, when driven, she would admit another file into that select group, but these times were rare and occurred generally when the product offered was so specialized and vertical the Chosen 250 could not encompass marketing to it.

This was not my way when I was an active broker, but it was an excellent way. The flaw in Annette’s thinking, it could be argued, is that by choosing from 250, you exclude the other 24,750. But to Annette, the top 250 was the distillation of everything effective about mailing lists. They had an excellent track record, were well-maintained, produced hordes of hotline names, were for the most part multi-segmented and the buyers were the cream of the market-there was something for everyone. Their results were consistent. Mailers liked these lists; they had heard of them, making it easier for them to plunk down money to rent the files.

What should a mailer look for in a list recommendation, and what should a mailer provide to a broker to get a good list recommendation?

List recommendations, as Ernest Hemingway once wrote about writing, are 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. A good broker has got to work him or herself to the bone to deliver a really good recommendation-ask questions, become immersed in the affinities between a client’s package and the list’s characteristics, and then justify the choices to the client. There are a lot of good brokers out there, but not all of them do this; and those that do sometimes don’t do it well. The same thing can be said for mailers; if they really care, they’ll give the broker terrific input.

Here are some questions for mailers to consider.

* Has the broker given a written rationale for each recommendation?

Why, specifically, has each list been recommended? This is particularly important; yet a considerable number of mailers don’t insist on-and a considerable number of brokers don’t offer-written notes to back up a broker’s selections.

Yes, I know: If the offer is for tennis equipment, it doesn’t take a maven to understand why a tennis magazine list has been recommended. But there are generally very few lists that have a direct affinity with the offer-and many of those are competitive, which means they won’t rent. So the broker must turn to a set of lists that has secondary affinities with the offer. Those affinities must be explained to the mailer. That’s one of the things for which you pay a broker-not only for the list recommendation, but for the ideas behind it.

* Have you provided the broker with a marketing context for your mailing?

“What? The mailer is making me work in the dark again?” I thought that on dozens of occasions when starting on a list recommendation!

A mailer almost always has a marketing goal, beyond the obvious one of maximizing results on a mailing. Maybe they are concerned about conversion results. Or vice versa; they’re selling a lot of product to the mailer’s inquirers, but aren’t getting enough front-end inquiries. Maybe they perceive their marketing mix as shifting toward females. Maybe some product additions to a catalog have created the need for buyers willing to go for a higher unit of sale. Maybe the percentage of test quantities in mailings is going up because of pressure to increase gross dollars from top management.

I think mailers are so reticent about revealing these problems and goals to their brokers because they fear brokers will gossip. That’s not an unfounded fear. In my experience, brokers do tend to talk-about personalities, but certainly not marketing problems. I’d say the value to the mailer of sharing these problems more than outweighs the risks. You’ll get better, more well-thought-out recommendations- with improved bottom-line results.

* If you multiply the product’s unit of sale by the number of annual buyers, does your calculation equal the national debt of Argentina?

This is a terrific list whose data card you’re reading. The product is a line of sweaters made from yak fur, with degrees of comfort and warmth in the sweater from the thinnest fur-field yak-and going all the way to the thickest-mountain yak. Seventy-five thousand buyers bought these sweaters last year, from a new and ambitious company, and the unit of sale averaged $110-really great for high-end offers.

That’s $8.25 million. For a company whose product you never heard of before, that came out of nowhere, that’s unbelievabamiento. And, if you look hard enough, you’ll find about a dozen unbelievabamiento lists in the directories.

A list, as we all know, is a phantom product; the mailer and broker never see it, the list owner and manager don’t-and if you did, you wouldn’t even know if it was the one you ordered. Life in the list-rental business is hard enough as it is. It’s much harder if you don’t read the data card carefully and think about what the text really means.

* In the event of a break-even, is there a fallback position?

You like this list. It’s big. The product to which the names responded has some affinity with your product, and the names responded to a direct mail offer.

You could win, and if you do there are lots of names to return to. But if you don’t win, if you come close but no cigar, is there a fallback segment to add to your original order on a retest? And if you do re-test with that added segment, are there still enough names in the list to make a continuation worth your while?

The “fallback segment” could be the addition of another marketing factor: your best states instead of the 48 or 50 on the list; males or females only; or a unit of sale over X dollars. All these added factors will of course bring down your available universe-but they might well bring up your results.

* Who is the list owner?

One of the strongest rules I had when looking through a directory of lists was, on a merchandise buyer’s list, is the list owner named?

The answer the mailer often gets is that the list owner wants anonymity. Think about this for a minute.

It’s perfectly valid for the list owner to want anonymity. It’s their right. But you’ve got a right to assess, in the light of the product, whether anonymity makes any sense.

My own general rule was, if the product is a real mass-marketing one-something commonly on the market, such as a diet or a general fundraising file-you ought to look closely at the list one more time.

I also should add that, in my experience, a lot of files with un-named list owners really worked well. It’s often a mistake to assume that, given the lack of an owner, it won’t work. But you could get burned, and you ought to be forewarned. The risk of renting this kind of file is that, since you may not know where it came from, you’ll have less of a guarantee that the continuation names are of the same type as the test names.

* Don’t be afraid to ask for something that’s not on the data card.

Give you a terrific example: when I ran a brokerage house, I became, in my latter years, enamored of nine-digit ZIP analysis. This came from a close conviction that nine-digit ZIPs would work far better than the standard five-digit type in creating a geo-model.

But no mailer had ever asked me for a rental based on nine-digit ZIPs, and we had been stupid enough to swallow the assumption that the reason for this was list owners weren’t offering the segment for rental. What was the good in pursuing the idea if one couldn’t translate it into rental?

One day, in desperation, I asked someone to check the top 250 lists-see how Annette Brodsky’s wisdom came back to us periodically-to determine how many could deliver names by nine-digit ZIPs. Eighty-four percent! Jackpot!

Mailers might find this a useful exercise: Sit down and think about the kind of thing you want to rent from a mailing list. Don’t settle for what is offered, go for what you want. You should be able to create a wish list in a very short time.

Then discuss the wish list with your broker, and don’t take “It’s not available” for an answer. Ask the broker to check with the managers of some major lists you rent to discuss these matters. Chances are you’ll be disappointed. But one day, one memorable day, you’ll feel like you won the lottery.

Mailing lists aren’t magical things that appear out of thin air and-poof!-become vehicles of response in a report 10 days after they’re mailed. They are organic. They have properties that are worth thinking about before they are selected. They are your lifeblood, so think hard.

THERE ARE AS many ways of making a good list recommendation as there are loopholes in our tax laws. I have some real favorites, but the one that comes to mind is Annette Brodsky’s. Formerly the president of Accredited Lists, Annette was the world’s greatest expert on the top 250 lists in America. A data card for Fingerhut in front of her on a desk, her eyes would move across the card, stopping only if another revelatory smidgen of knowledge came into her mind as a virtually Talmudic insight.

And just as a Talmudic scholar will sometimes insist the Zohar reveals the sum total of human existence, all of Annette’s list recommendations came from those 250 lists. Occasionally, when driven, she would admit another file into that select group, but these times were rare and occurred generally when the product offered was so specialized and vertical the Chosen 250 could not encompass marketing to it.

This was not my way when I was an active broker, but it was an excellent way. The flaw in Annette’s thinking, it could be argued, is that by choosing from 250, you exclude the other 24,750. But to Annette, the top 250 was the distillation of everything effective about mailing lists. They had an excellent track record, were well-maintained, produced hordes of hotline names, were for the most part multi-segmented and the buyers were the cream of the market-there was something for everyone. Their results were consistent. Mailers liked these lists; they had heard of them, making it easier for them to plunk down money to rent the files.

What should a mailer look for in a list recommendation, and what should a mailer provide to a broker to get a good list recommendation?

List recommendations, as Ernest Hemingway once wrote about writing, are 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. A good broker has got to work him or herself to the bone to deliver a really good recommendation-ask questions, become immersed in the affinities between a client’s package and the list’s characteristics, and then justify the choices to the client. There are a lot of good brokers out there, but not all of them do this; and those that do sometimes don’t do it well. The same thing can be said for mailers; if they really care, they’ll give the broker terrific input.

Here are some questions for mailers to consider.

* Has the broker given a written rationale for each recommendation?

Why, specifically, has each list been recommended? This is particularly important; yet a considerable number of mailers don’t insist on-and a considerable number of brokers don’t offer-written notes to back up a broker’s selections.

Yes, I know: If the offer is for tennis equipment, it doesn’t take a maven to understand why a tennis magazine list has been recommended. But there are generally very few lists that have a direct affinity with the offer-and many of those are competitive, which means they won’t rent. So the broker must turn to a set of lists that has secondary affinities with the offer. Those affinities must be explained to the mailer. That’s one of the things for which you pay a broker-not only for the list recommendation, but for the ideas behind it.

* Have you provided the broker with a marketing context for your mailing?

“What? The mailer is making me work in the dark again?” I thought that on dozens of occasions when starting on a list recommendation!

A mailer almost always has a marketing goal, beyond the obvious one of maximizing results on a mailing. Maybe they are concerned about conversion results. Or vice versa; they’re selling a lot of product to the mailer’s inquirers, but aren’t getting enough front-end inquiries. Maybe they perceive their marketing mix as shifting toward females. Maybe some product additions to a catalog have created the need for buyers willing to go for a higher unit of sale. Maybe the percentage of test quantities in mailings is going up because of pressure to increase gross dollars from top management.

I think mailers are so reticent about revealing these problems and goals to their brokers because they fear brokers will gossip. That’s not an unfounded fear. In my experience, brokers do tend to talk-about personalities, but certainly not marketing problems. I’d say the value to the mailer of sharing these problems more than outweighs the risks. You’ll get better, more well-thought-out recommendations- with improved bottom-line results.

* If you multiply the product’s unit of sale by the number of annual buyers, does your calculation equal the national debt of Argentina?

This is a terrific list whose data card you’re reading. The product is a line of sweaters made from yak fur, with degrees of comfort and warmth in the sweater from the thinnest fur-field yak-and going all the way to the thickest-mountain yak. Seventy-five thousand buyers bought these sweaters last year, from a new and ambitious company, and the unit of sale averaged $110-really great for high-end offers.

That’s $8.25 million. For a company whose product you never heard of before, that came out of nowhere, that’s unbelievabamiento. And, if you look hard enough, you’ll find about a dozen unbelievabamiento lists in the directories.

A list, as we all know, is a phantom product; the mailer and broker never see it, the list owner and manager don’t-and if you did, you wouldn’t even know if it was the one you ordered. Life in the list-rental business is hard enough as it is. It’s much harder if you don’t read the data card carefully and think about what the text really means.

* In the event of a break-even, is there a fallback position?

You like this list. It’s big. The product to which the names responded has some affinity with your product, and the names responded to a direct mail offer.

You could win, and if you do there are lots of names to return to. But if you don’t win, if you come close but no cigar, is there a fallback segment to add to your original order on a retest? And if you do re-test with that added segment, are there still enough names in the list to make a continuation worth your while?

The “fallback segment” could be the addition of another marketing factor: your best states instead of the 48 or 50 on the list; males or females only; or a unit of sale over X dollars. All these added factors will of course bring down your available universe-but they might well bring up your results.

* Who is the list owner?

One of the strongest rules I had when looking through a directory of lists was, on a merchandise buyer’s list, is the list owner named?

The answer the mailer often gets is that the list owner wants anonymity. Think about this for a minute.

It’s perfectly valid for the list owner to want anonymity. It’s their right. But you’ve got a right to assess, in the light of the product, whether anonymity makes any sense.

My own general rule was, if the product is a real mass-marketing one-something commonly on the market, such as a diet or a general fundraising file-you ought to look closely at the list one more time.

I also should add that, in my experience, a lot of files with un-named list owners really worked well. It’s often a mistake to assume that, given the lack of an owner, it won’t work. But you could get burned, and you ought to be forewarned. The risk of renting this kind of file is that, since you may not know where it came from, you’ll have less of a guarantee that the continuation names are of the same type as the test names.

* Don’t be afraid to ask for something that’s not on the data card.

Give you a terrific example: when I ran a brokerage house, I became, in my latter years, enamored of nine-digit ZIP analysis. This came from a close conviction that nine-digit ZIPs would work far better than the standard five-digit type in creating a geo-model.

But no mailer had ever asked me for a rental based on nine-digit ZIPs, and we had been stupid enough to swallow the assumption that the reason for this was list owners weren’t offering the segment for rental. What was the good in pursuing the idea if one couldn’t translate it into rental?

One day, in desperation, I asked someone to check the top 250 lists-see how Annette Brodsky’s wisdom came back to us periodically-to determine how many could deliver names by nine-digit ZIPs. Eighty-four percent! Jackpot!

Mailers might find this a useful exercise: Sit down and think about the kind of thing you want to rent from a mailing list. Don’t settle for what is offered, go for what you want. You should be able to create a wish list in a very short time.

Then discuss the wish list with your broker, and don’t take “It’s not available” for an answer. Ask the broker to check with the managers of some major lists you rent to discuss these matters. Chances are you’ll be disappointed. But one day, one memorable day, you’ll feel like you won the lottery.

Mailing lists aren’t magical things that appear out of thin air and-poof!-become vehicles of response in a report 10 days after they’re mailed. They are organic. They have properties that are worth thinking about before they are selected. They are your lifeblood, so think hard.