Two Views of the State of the List Industry

Direct marketing budgets are being drastically cut. And that means traditional list marketing has to change.

“Over the past six months, marketers have pulled back on their demand creation activities and have shifted focus to nurturing leads currently within the sales funnel,” says Brian Hession, founder and president of Oceanos Marketing. “We have recently observed a significant uptick for custom prospecting data.”

“The economic recession, coupled with a wider portfolio of creative options, will phase out the traditional list brokerage model,” Hession notes. Traditional list companies “will be replaced with strategic demand creation firms that specialize in designing custom list strategies from the wide array of third party list rental sources.”

Printers, data processing firms and lettershops as well as list firms are suffering