Interview
Q: What was your first job?
My first “job” was selling worms at a roadside stand in front of my house. As an industrious 12-year old, I took it upon myself to gather crawlers on rainy nights and post my stand along a busy road that led to a local lake and nearby trout stream. I quickly realized the meaning of supply and demand, as I had more customers than bait. With too much demand from my loyal customers, I would ride my bicycle 3 miles on a country road to buy worms from an 80-year-old woman who would follow her husband picking worms from his freshly-tilled fields. She would sell me worms at $1.00/100, and I would repackage and sell them at $1.00/25…thus my second education point: wholesaler/retailer relationships. This small little business eventually morphed into a stand-alone bait & tackle business my father and I ran out of an addition we built on the house. I learned a great deal about marketing, customer service, and general business acumen from this experience. Q: What was your most interesting job? My current job is my most interesting as it affords me the opportunity to use my database marketing and analytics knowledge to drive an international, direct response business. I have been in a service-oriented role my whole career and this position has enabled me to cross the fence to P&L ownership. Q: How did you get into Direct Marketing? I entered Direct Marketing out of college. I graduated with a Quantitative Business Analysis degree, which typically led to a programmer job at the time. I started as an SAS programmer working for The Prudential Insurance AARP Operations, which sold insurance products direct to the AARP membership base (primary direct mail). This foundation of programming and data mining created a great foundation for me as I advanced in my career. Q: Who are your major influences? My parents, who are both educators and with little money and backing were able to buy their own business. They have always been encouraging. Also, one of my professors in college, Dr. Kaboudan, encouraged me to pursue "computers" at a time when most students were not taking computer classes. He also had an extremely open door, and through his mentoring, I ended up in the Quantitative Business Analysis program at Penn State. Q: Of all the projects you have worked on, which one(s) stand out? When I first started at Rodale in 1997 as a statistician/modeler, the company was going through a major redevelopment of the Marketing Database (in those days we worried aboutY2K readiness and the push to get off legacy mainframes). I was initially involved in a peripheral aspect of the project, but in 1999 the overall project fell apart. I was asked to lead the project team of internal and external staff to build a new outsourced solution. This was an enormous undertaking for the company, and having come off a failed initiative, the project team was under tremendous pressure to deliver. Working closely with the internal and external team, we collectively delivered a great solution that is still being used and enhanced today. Q: What is the most exciting aspect of the DM field right now? DM is the future of all marketing as media is becoming increasingly measurable and targetable, and technology is no longer a barrier. “Mass” advertising is fading away as non-DM companies demand measurement and accountability from their budgets. The Direct Mail industry is changing from a DM-based industry to the way marketing is done today in all channels. Q: How do you see direct marketing evolving in the next 10 years? As technology continues to evolve and as the lines between media collapse (TV, Internet, wireless, email), consumers will continue to demand increasing levels of multi-channel recognition, relevance and will be less sensitive to privacy issues. Q: How are you responding to this challenge? Continuing to build multi-channel programs, while always leveraging the “traditional” direct marketing disciplines, is how we are responding to the challenge. Q: Are there any other challenges facing marketers that you would like to discuss? Resourcing is a continued issue in my area, and I would suspect, as an industry. It’s becoming increasingly important to find and keep staff members who are able to bridge multiple disciplines. We always need specialists who can dive very deep in one area (regression modeling), but those individuals who can understand the full marketing process are very hard to find, and it’s becoming more difficult to invest in training.
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