THE CLIENT SIDE: Mailers weigh in on issues in DIRECT’s annual List Roundtable
WE’VE HEARD FROM managers. We’ve heard from brokers. This year, DIRECT decided to invite an even more intriguing group to its annual List Roundtable: Mailers.
As we expected, the discussion – featuring a half- dozen marketing executives – was light on list industry politics. We actually talked about mailing lists and how to use them.
It turns out that mailers face challenges on many fronts, but they are hardly beleaguered. Response rates are holding steady and you can find names. You just have to work harder to do it. Many are also relying more heavily on their house files and moving into new media.
And they seem satisfied with the service they are getting from their brokers and managers.
Of course, it would be inaccurate to say that none of the participants are involved in the list business. Two of the firms represented on the panel, Fingerhut and Boardroom, manage their lists inhouse. The moderator, Lesli Rodgers, is a veteran list pro who moved over this year to the client side; She works for the VitaminShoppe.com.
No two are exactly alike – for example, Maxine Neil of the Data-Faber Cancer Institute and Ted Zollinger of American Family Enterprises, face very different problems. But they all the same chore: Finding customers or donors – and keeping them – in an ever-changing business environment.
LESLI: Let’s begin by putting you on the spot. When I first started in the industry, a really premium list was $35 or $40 a thousand. And now we’re talking about e-mail lists that are $250. Let me ask you this: If you are tell an outside list-owner that you can’t afford to rent their list, and they say, “All right, I’ll reduce the cost from $100 to $75 and I won’t charge you any selections,” would you go out and test it?
LORI: Sure.
LESLI: Would you reduce your own list price to $75 flat, no selects?
LORI: I don’t know if we’d go that far.
LESLI: Ohh! It’s okay when it comes to you…
BRIAN: I answer yes and yes to both of those questions.
LESLI: Then why don’t we all drop the list rates?
BRIAN: Some people will never get the message.
LESLI: Here’s the issue. We keep tightening the screws, the list costs keep going up. We’re driving the big mailers into using more and more of their database which reduces the costs. So why isn’t everybody reducing the lists costs in order to generate more business?
BRIAN: I don’t think the answer is reducing across the board. I still think it’s the mailer’s responsibility to show the list owner why you need it. That’s why there should be some standardization of computer verification on merge/purge even. Because it’s the same kind of issue that says: this is what I need to do on your list to make it work. If you’re willing to take this order at this price because I showed you my results, that’s your choice. It’s your list. But not drop the price across the board because everybody says it’s too expensive? No.
LESLI: But if every single list owner were to drop their list prices by $10 a thousand, wouldn’t that drive more business out by the mailer because all of a sudden the mailers would be able to rent more names?
STEVE: The fact is the big lists you use successfully will probably reciprocally price with you. They’re probably the same list you use. So I would say we do drop the price in rates for a reciprocity basis. Now I supposed we’re back to the should we exchange or do reciprocal pricing which means just an accounting function. It’s a lot easier to do reciprocal rentals than it is to exchanges.
BRIAN: That’s funny because I find it easier to do exchanges.
STEVE: Someone has to maintain a balance. What happens when it’s a seasonal mailer? The balance is way out of whack and the list doesn’t work for you. Now all of a sudden you’ve got this huge balance…
BRIAN: Well, we set ceilings. We have a ceiling set on every single list that we exchange with, so that at the time of the list clearance, we decide whether this is going to be a smart marketing decision for both parties to extend the exchange. List price is a function of what I can afford to pay, what you want to make in terms of profit.
LESLI: It’s one thing when you come to the table as both mailer and list owner with the power of a million names behind you and the purchasing power to buy 10 million names. But I have to believe that Maxine doesn’t feel the same ability to negotiate.
MAXINE: That is true. On the other hand, because we’re a nonprofit organization, I’ve had the occasion to talk to some of the list owners and say we’re poor and some of them are willing to let us test for a month just to see if it works.
LORI: The emotional pull.
MAXINE: Well, that’s what works for us.
LESLI: Where are you finding new names?
MAXINE: Maybe seven years ago our lists were comprised of 60 percent exchanges and 40 percent rented lists. That has switched this year to about 60 percent rented lists. That’s been a major cost so we’re finding the names because we have to go out to buy them.
LESLI: Why are you moving from exchanges?
MAXINE: We’re limited in the number of names that we can get and the lists that work for us. Most of them are donor lists – March of Dimes lists and the like. We got to the point where we were getting a duplication rate of about 60 percent, so we had to move out of our comfort zone.
BRIAN: In terms of lifetime value, life expectancy is longer so we figure that the people will be on our database longer and buy our products for a longer period of time. The question is how far out is it necessary to look at a new prospect and are we going to make a profit on it. That calculation has gone out a little further because some of the shortage from shrinking universes. And here’s an idea: We did some focus groups and one of the groups was ex-buyers. They were looking at the current issue and saying. `I don’t know why I stopped subscribing to this.’ Why not go to your ex-buyer list? In a lot of ways you can invest in them like you would an outside list. With the hygiene that’s available, you can go way back. We have names that we mailed that probably go back into the mid’80s.
STEVE: We’re expanding in the Hispanic market. In the last three years, our Spanish speaking market has grown 45 percent. They have a much higher name value, they spend more money, they buy more often. We’ve put our thrust there because a lot of the traditional lists that we’ve used are simply going away. The sweepstakes list have pretty much gone. U.S. Sales is gone. A few other lists I won’t name because people are probably happy to see them gone. When a company like AFE or PCH cuts back on their mailing plans, it has a tremendous ripple effect on the industry. This has forced us to go more to catalog requests and space, that sort of thing. But some of the dot-coms are helping out by creating more traditional lists – not e-mail lists, but postal names and addresses that traditional mailers can use successfully.
TED: One of the big differences for us is that there is absolutely nothing in our core sweepstakes business. There’s nothing for testing in terms of catalogs, nor in databases and compiled lists. We’ve branched out to ancillary usages – non-sweepstakes marketing, merchandising marketing and cross-selling.
STEVE: What are you doing with your core business?
TED: The mailing themselves are smaller because our response rates are down – as the sweepstakes industry is. There are less prospecting lists that work, and there are less names on the prospecting lists available. We’ve started working on renewals and upsales to current customers, In our core area, some response rates might be lower and lists might be smaller, but now we’re willing to take a bigger loss in year one if we have more product to sell in the back end and we can take it out over a period of years.
LORI: Externally, Time is going to non-sweepstakes. But we are largely using our internal database. With all the changes in this marketplace, we’ve been forced toward it more than we might be, and I think that’s a good thing. We’re doing more and more modeling and finding more new segments like that. Our database is really powerful.
LESLI: Is it going to become more powerful when you ad AOL?
LORI: I would imagine.
LESLI: What do you think you should do if you don’t have the power of Time Inc. and all those and all those titles behind you?
LORI: There are certainly other outside sources that can do like modeling for you.
MAXINE: We hear a lot about [co-op] databases and their value, but we’ve been reluctant to get involved.
LESLI: Abacus is the giant in that field. The concept was brilliant because it hadn’t been done before and I don’t think anybody has really done it as well as Abacus has. A multi-buyer, in a merge/purge – it’s still the best name that you can get. And I think that’s probably also true in fund raising.
MAXINE: Particularly if you mail to them and they show up three times and they give three times.
LESLI: At this point, Abacus must have almost every mail-order buyer in the country in this pyramid and they’ve been able to rise everybody to the top – the ten-time a year multi-buyers from local sources. That top 10 percent of the universe is being hit by so many people. My biggest concern is, and I have to believe in it’s the same thing in fundraising, is that there’s just so much that those people can take and support and at some point in time that top 10 percent is going to fail and then where do you go because you haven’t built your house file up to support it and provide it with other things. Of course, Time has a huge database with a variety of titles, but when you only have one vehicle…
BRIAN: I guess as a database owner, we’re sort of in between. We’re not Time Inc., but we’re also not regional, and we have a fairly large database. And we have multi-products, so we have been more dependant on our house file. Every house selection we do is off a progression model. So yes, those top people come to the top as long as we can deliver some new product to them. They haven’t been completely bored with us yet.
LESLI: We’ve got the three different shopping channels, we have catalog.com and retail, so we can capitalize on that kind of an intrinsic database internally. But you come back to somebody who’s regional and has one focus, and one focus only, and they almost have no choice but to go to that.
RAY: Are you finding reduced response to the prospect lists?
STEVE: I wouldn’t say reduced response as much as I’d say this: That through the use of modeling or whatever techniques, you are tightening up your mail screens to keep your response rates at a level that’s acceptable. All you’re doing is getting to fewer customers and mailing fewer names, which is not what we want to do. But I think a lot of mailers, because of pricing pressures, have had to do that.
LESLI: It’s getting harder to maintain. You have to work harder and pay more to get them to be the same if that’s your benchmark, to stay the same. But what about modeling?
TED: Modeling works best inside. We’ve had a lot of luck targeting customers with different offers in house. We’ve also had some luck prospecting to general buyers. But we have no luck with compiled files. I think our problem is that we’re too mass a mailer. We can’t target customers because we have 240 different magazines listed in every single piece that we have and it’s too diverse. But for mail-order buyers we have a lot of luck.
BRIAN: Our experience is similar to Ted’s in that house file modeling is a way of life now and there’s no other way. There’s no better way to do selection on our house database. As far as outside models on response lists, I would say our results are mixed on the negative side. I don’t know if it’s a function of our products maybe not being vertical enough, although we do have some vertical products, or it’s sometimes the model is only as good as the modeler. The problem that I’ve seen with certain models is that the differentiation between desciles is not consistent and that has to have something to do with what variables are being identified, how the modelers put it together and maybe they’re not using all the variables and they’re saving them for their house files. So they need to be more cookie-cutter when they’re going to the outside. That’s been a problem over time.
LESLI: The model is only as strong as the modeler because there are really some good progression people out there, and I think there are some people who pretend to be really good. When you build a file that you keep going back to, and all of a sudden the modeling staff has changed, you can see the difference immediately. That has happened to me a couple of times.
STEVE: Basically modeling is going to give you lift. It isn’t going to take a bad list and make it a good list. But if it is a marginal list, it will probably put you in the mail. Certainly at Fingerhut we model virtually everything. We’ve got about 35 people in our research and analysis group that do nothing but build models.
LESLI: Who actually is doing something that’s just as simplistic as RFM? I was reading in the Direct Marketing Association’s List Book that a lot of catalog marketers have talked about it but weren’t really doing it. It strikes me as being odd.
MAXINE: In our area, that’s what we do.
STEVE: I think RFM will factor that into virtually every model somewhere along the line.
TED: I think that the ones who aren’t modeling are that their files are probably too small to model. If you’ve got 100,000 names which work with, there’s not a lot you can get out of modeling.
BRIAN: We buy lifestyle data and overlay it onto our file of mail-order buyers, so now I know which Bottom Line subscribers are interested in fishing. Is it worth doing? We just do a calculation that says we’re going to make this much in list rental based on the promises that we get from certain mailers and if it pays out, it pays out. And if it doesn’t, we don’t do it.
LESLI: What about exchanges?
BRIAN: They’re just a method of payment, but I think it ties in to the philosophy of the mailer. We see ourselves as a database marketer, and we do very much look at bringing new names into our file and then cross selling them another product. No mail order business can survive without repeat business. What an exchange means for us is that we’re using our list as a tool to bring in more outside names at a lower cost.
LESLI: Our corporate philosophy is that our lists are not really available for exchange. I think may be we do maybe five of them every year and we pay for all names. It’s gotten to the point where we really have to look at it not only in terms of the long term investment, but in terms of the cost to acquire. Was it one year out and what is it three years out. If it doesn’t meet those qualifications in a certain progression of events, it’s very difficult for us to justify it.
TED: We don’t do really any exchanges. I know our corporate philosophy has always been not to.
BRIAN: The one [excuse] that I hate [to hear] is that we’re not going to exchange because we can’t keep track of the balances. I have never accepted that in this age of computerization, you can’t keep a ledger of how many names you take, how many names I take, and reconfirm it every time you take a new list order. I think a list owner should take responsibility.
Brokers
RAY: How do you work with your brokers, and is their role changing?
LORI: I’ve only been in Time Inc. about eight months, but for the first time I’m using multiple brokers. Prior to Time Inc. I always used one broker per product. They were an interested part of our strategy team and everything it encompassed. Now, because we do our own list trading internally, I’m using multiple brokers. Maybe one will have the core part of our business, but they won’t have broad a perspective as we’d like. We’ll expand it out to two or three brokers. Because of that, they’re not going to be involved as the relationship we had in the past.
LESLI: So you’re getting better service or you’re getting less service?
LORI: In some ways I am getting less service. But I think it puts the pressure back on me to make sure I’m getting the service. It didn’t happen as naturally.
BRIAN: We ask our brokers for a lot. We ask them to do a lot more research probably than the average mailer. I will tell you this: On rentals we still pay a full 20 percent and I know we don’t have to because there are people with our volume that wouldn’t pay a full 20 percent. But we do so much on exchange, and I know they’re not making 20 percent on exchanges. I also want to be in a position to be able to use them for what I consider to be real strategic thinking. If I ask them for primary, secondary, and tertiary universes for a particular new product launch, I’m asking them to do all of that with no guarantee. If I don’t launch that product, the don’t make a penny. I’ve even had situations where I felt guilty enough to pay them a fee to do that book in case we don’t launch. Now if we do launch I give them sort of a guarantee that they’ll get all the list orders and that’s where they make their money.
LESLI: List companies have always been dealing with the compensation issue, and the fact that they’re commission-based. The idea has been floated of being paid for extra services and extra fees for that or being put on a retainer and giving up a commission. But a lot of list companies are afraid to say put me on retainer.
BRIAN: I think that they’d lose that chance for that big windfall. Direct mail is such a cool business because you’ll get that big win in creative and all of a sudden you’ll do an incredible campaign and you’ll blow-out millions and millions of names.
STEVE: The bottom line is you look at a total broker compensation for the year and then determine if you got your value from that amount of money, whether it’s commission or fixed-fee. It’s still going to come out to be the same thing. We have three or four brokers at Fingerhut. We ask for recommendations monthly when we go through our selection process. We give each broker a form and on that form we ask all kinds of things like who’s the list owner, how were the names generated, why do you recommend this list, general demographics. They have to complete each form. The most important thing is why are you recommending this list? Give me your logic. So each broker submits so many requests every month and we have people that sit down and go through them and hammer out their list selections. We also ask them every month for one new idea, I don’t care, off the cuff, blue sky. Give me some hair-brained idea because every now and then something may pop and stick that you hadn’t even thought about.
BRIAN: The work sheet aspect is really important because if you work with just data cards, even with data cards with a few notes on them, I don’t think that’s sufficient anymore. Not that it was ever sufficient, but it certainly is not sufficient today. Too many people are using data cards as a sales tool which they’re not. They’re supposed to be a data tool.
LESLI: they lie anyway.
TED: We’ve got five different brokers right now. I’ve worked with as many as seven. There’s no happy medium. Sometimes you have too many and it means trimming them down a little. I think that in terms of a large mailer working with more brokers is better because its more eyes in the marketplace. We regularly set up meetings with the brokers. We talk about what we’re doing, what do they see that we need to change, their insight into what’s going on.
LESLI: How much of a role your list manager and your list broker play in your merge/purge? Do they have any input? Do they care?
STEVE: We don’t really use our brokers. They’re not involved at all in the merge/purge process. We do it all in-house.
BRIAN: We do too. But I think there are certain instructions that we do. We want to instruct our brokers, what we’re doing. A simple one was, what you said before, Leslie, about mailing multi-buyers at a later date with another related offer. My broker has to know that in case they have to submit any extra samples and that’s a merge/purge option.
LESLI: If you’re talking about the technology that can really, again, it comes back to data mining. Merge/purge is a tool to get to more data when you’re bring lists in to a temporary database. That’s what a merge/purge is. So, why not include the brokers?
STEVE: I would disagree. A subsequent mailing is a marketing function, not a product of merge/purge. Our brokers know that and we do subsequent mailings, but it’s already pre-planned at the start of the whole campaign.
LESLI: A merge/purge is really a temporary database. It’s there for a period of time and then it’s gone. Before you actually mail from it, why not set it up so that it actually tells you things that you wouldn’t normally know? Because only in that merge/purge can you look at the relationship between certain lists and other lists. Some things would actually jump out at the broker that might not jump out to us as mailers and list owners.
LORI: It would be awfully difficult for me to involve a broker at that level because of the that way we work with Tampa obviously to do our merge/purge and the way that the information goes back and forth. It’s all very automated and to be honest, it’s not easy to understand. It’s unlike any merge/purge instructions I’ve ever written before in my life.
LESLI: You have a particularly cooperative service bureau.
LORI: I wouldn’t say that. Also because we’re using several brokers at one time, some of that information I wouldn’t necessarily want to release.
LESLI: I would totally disagree on that.
TED: I also think the difference is that when there’s one broker working on it, it’s easier to get him involved with this. When you’ve got five brokers you can’t have them all come over and sit around a green sheet and look at the merge/purge output. Time Inc. has a system that can project and compare actual outlook to see if anything’s off budget. It overlays all sorts of information.
LESLI: The problem I see about it is that every relationship is unique. Every negotiation is unique. You almost have to spend a large majority of your time on that one-on-one negotiation.
STEVE: Well, almost every word becomes a negotiation. You’re processing thousands of orders. It is time consuming. You can’t go and negotiate with the post office, so you negotiate with the list owners and paper costs, to some extent. Everybody always turns to the list. It’s like the list is where it’s all gravy.
BRIAN: Thank goodness that the list business isn’t a monopoly.
LESLI: I’d like to disagree.
List Management
RAY: Steve and Brian, what are the benefits of managing a list inhouse?
STEVE: Cost is certainly a big factor. I would venture to say that at Fingerhut we manager our list for a lot less money that we would if we went outside. The other thing is nobody knows a list like a list owner. Outside managers do a great job. But they cannot possibly know the list like the owner can. The other thing is we have a dedicated staff. They don’t do anything else.
BRIAN: I agree with part of what Steve said, but again in the same breath I would not recommend inhouse list management. Don’t try this at home. I think you have to have a lot of things in place to even make it worthwhile. You need a big enough file to justify that staff. You need a lot of selection criteria so that there’s a lot of different segments to sell. There’s the overhead. What puts us in a little different category is that our inhouse list management is part of circulation. It’s part of the entire marketing effort. In fact, our list management staff sits in on various marketing meetings. They make list recommendations to our circulation people when they see something in the marketplace.
LESLI: That is so perfect. But let’s take it even one step further. True, very few companies can truly justify having a list management in-house. But if you’re going to go to an outside list manager, why not empower them by including them in those circulation meetings? Have the main part of your contract with them that we want you to be in these meetings. I don’t know a list manager out there who does not say we want to be your partner. Bring’em in.
BRIAN: The truth comes out, I assume, when a list managers goes to do a presentation at a brokerage house and they bring a bunch of data cards as opposed to mail pieces, or as opposed to really talking about the list and how it’s put together. That’s where it shows up that they’ve not been involved in the process that the mailer.
STEVE: Sometimes it’s difficult for a manager and a list broker to grind teeth. And as I well know, sometimes it’s very difficult to get to New York.
LORI: And how many clients does that person have? How many lists are they managing?
TED: I think we make out pretty well because we’ve got what I would consider a really good list manager who’s no more than five minutes away from our office so when we need them, we can get in touch with them.
The other thing we have going for us is that the internal list process is handled by the marketing manger. So the incoming lists and the out-going lists are going to the same person which I think understands both sides of the business better.
LESLI: Unfortunately, our list isn’t on the market.
STEVE: Shame on you.
LORI: We have an internal person who manages our data process. She will work with Millard to make sure what’s happening. She puts them in a lot of marketing meetings and is very active in keeping track of exchange balances and will very hard to put caps on each and every one.
RAY: In light of all this stuff, how important is direct mail in your media mix?
STEVE: We’re allowing the customer to choose the channel. We’re mailing, we advertise our Web sites in all of our print material – virtually every other page in the catalog. We want to be there for the customer whether it’s online or offline.
LESLI: It’s really changing for us because we have three shopping channels. In the past, the direct mail expertise was focused on developing and retaining the catalog customer. With the expansion of the retail and the expansion of the Internet site, we have the opportunity to combine our media so now it’s actually promoted as all three. As Steve says, we want the wallet share. But that brings us to the question: Are you all using e-mail lists?
BRIAN: We just started getting into e-marketing. There are no direct mail lists that I think we could pay $250 a thousand for. It’s exciting, it’s new, but my sense is that the prices are way out of whack and that it will be up to us as mailers to share data again and to let the list owners know that $250 is not going to work, but maybe $80 will. Again, you’re saving postage and paper, but there’s still a cost of delivery. List costs becomes a much higher percentage of what the total.
STEVE: That may well be, but I’m not in a position to say that e-mail lists should be $80 or $250. To me it’s a cost per net name or cost per acquisition.
LESLI: There are some e-mail list owners out there who are saying: that’s the price, take it or leave it.
BRIAN: For now.
LESLI: Right. There are some who are willing to negotiate. But I think there are other intrinsic difficulties in the e-mail market. E-mail lists are considered a premium item especially because of the low opt-in, and the fact that you don’t have the opportunity to actually merge it against your house file – not unless you’re willing to send the house file out and pay an awful lot of extra money. So you don’t even know if you’re getting to new prospects or your own customers. Number two is the idea that unlike direct mail where you can, you’re basically printing one package to go to hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people, you can actually send out separate e-mails to separate target universes and each one will be based on html, and will look different in addition to sounding different.
STEVE: E-mail lists have to be qualified differently than postal names and addresses. To get somebody to say yes, it’s okay to give my e-mail address to a third party, is not easy. That’s why you’re seeing high prices. At Fingerhut we have over 1.4 million e-mail names right now, today, and all opt-in for our offers. That list is not on the market today and I don’t know that it will ever be. Where we’ll work is with partners with that have similar lists.
LESLI: You raise an interesting point. Everybody wants to be sure that they’re only going out with opt-in address and unfortunately, unlike the traditional list business, you frequently can’t tell whether or not the e-mail list that you’re renting has been totally opted in. It’s not like you can say “Show me the catalog, the subscription mailer, the double postcard, the magalog. So that does raise another issue.
STEVE: I’ll give you an example. We went out to rent 10 outside e-mail lists. Then we went to each site to look to see how they’re qualified as opt-in because we only wanted opt-in and they were all advertised as opt-in. We mailed two of the 10 because a lot of them were default opt-ins, pre-checked. I’m sorry, I’m not calling that an opt-in. I don’t know if the customer has seen it or not. If the customer hasn’t seen it and it’s been pre-checked, and you e-mail that list and you get shut down by an ISP as a spammer, plain and simple. I know the Association of Interactive Marketers is working on it. I’m a committee for responsible e-mail marketing.
Privacy
RAY: What about privacy in the traditional direct mail arena?
STEVE: I’m curious if you have lost any names because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act or the Financial Services Modernization Act [Gramm-Leach-Bliley]. We certainly have at Fingerhut. The Fair Credit Reporting Act caused us to lose several million names in our folders of mailing operations. After you pre-screen you must mail all the names and then you must accept all the orders; if you don’t do all of the above, you can’t mail those names. So we lost a bunch of names. Gramm-Leach-Bliley hasn’t had that much effect on us except that we have created a bank so now we’ve separated the merchant from the bank. The bank, because of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, must offer an opt-out of affiliate sharing, and the merchant is now considered an affiliate. Therefore, people can actually apply for credit a the Access National Bank which is formerly the Fingerhut National Bank.
And if they opt not to share information, the merchant can only get the name and address and that’s it. I still think privacy remains probably the number one threat to the list business.
BRIAN: It’s an issue that’s bi-partisan for sure. Knowing their history of buying behavior, yes you’re going to try sell them things similar to what they bought before, that’s very different than finding out what disease they have.
LESLI: I really don’t think that they differentiate it. Look at the whole push toward privacy on the children’s issue. That’s a very emotional issue. Of course, I want my child’s name protected. Of course I want them not to be on any mailing list.
LORI: That is one area that does affect my mail because I have one product that goes to the teen market and fewer and fewer lists are available with the child’s name. So we’ve had to change our strategies on lists. The names are still available, but they’re just in the family name.
BRIAN: This would be a good opportunity to encourage people to spend some time writing to their congressmen. The DMA has programs that they’re sponsoring for State Days where you go down to Washington.
STEVE: We need to have our ducks in a row. We need to offer disclosure and choice to our customers. If everyone offered disclosure and choice and used the MPS and TPS and EMPS and all those files, we’d have a story to tell. But not everyone is doing that. I think a lot of the good direct marketers and good DMA members are all onboard. The problem is there are a lot of non DMA members that don’t help us in this situation.
TED: That’s what happened last year in the sweepstakes market. Most of us are well regulated and above board. But a few members that aren’t caused the problem to come up again with regulators who looked again to the big companies to carry the banner for the business and the small companies.
BRIAN: We probably rejected more usages of our list in the last couple of years than we did in the previous 10. It’s not because we want to make less money on our lists, it’s because we’re asking different questions. You no longer rent to anybody who will prepay you or who comes through a reputable broker. It’s what do you want your customers to see, what do you want them to feel, because they’re the ones who are going to lobby to their congress people.
STEVE: There is such a thing as too much list rental.
LESLI: I never thought I’d hear you say that.
STEVE: Oh, how we change our ways.
