Opportunities and Challenges:
A Roundtable on b-to-b lists from DIRECT Magazine

ROBERTS: We're coming off a truly great year, so our experience has been somewhat different. As I talk to my customers and the agencies, there's a very strong movement to increase their budgets. We feel very bullish. We feel our business could be up anywhere from 20% to 50% this year, based on the stuff we're hearing. I think B-to-B in general is strong. But I also think the publishing marketplace, the IT marketplace, traditional B-to-B marketers, the educational people, the financial services people, all the people I speak to are telling us they plan increases on the postal side and the e-mail side. They have more money to do regression models, to do analytics on the back end.

PAPALIA: The B-to-B world is very resilient. The B-to-B mailer has to learn to survive by being innovative and creative, and dealing with the frontier town of e-mail coming in, and slowly adapting that into the normal process of doing business. Everyone in this room has learned over the last five to 10 years how to adapt, how to evolve into a different ' business, a different company, a different persona to help their clients.

BARLOW: I think the key to a good B-to-B strategy is to identify the clients who tend to be adopters of new technology [and] ideas, identify the ones who are returning from previous successes, but know they have to change and look at what those strategies are and share. Treat each individual client differently but maintain that global focus. I particularly agree with the change in e-mail marketing as it synergizes with postal. I think what a lot of B-to-B mailers are doing is using e-mail as a closure strategy or a [way] to stay engaged with a client they haven't yet been able to close.

DECKER: We definitely see reasons why the last 12 months will have a dramatic lift and I agree that one of those is the fact that people who have been doing e-mail have figured out they need to incorporate direct marketing principles. We also see that postal marketing is coming back more strongly than before, especially in the technology area. Two-tier or synergy marketing is going extremely well. In addition, it has taken some of the major mailers the better part of 2004 to figure out how to be compliant with, or how to manage their needs under, the Can Spam regulations. I think they've gotten hold of what they need to do, they've put practices in place and I think that will be the real strength for all of us for the second half of this year.

DUNN: On the whole argument between passive, inbound direct marketing and [outbound] direct marketing, the same old stuff applies. We just have more opportunities to get better at what we do, which is selectivity, targetability, accuracy. I think our industry [needs to] work together to share data, pool data into databases and find emerging industries that would love to do outbound pushes. They're selling something very expensive to someone who is very hard to find. There's always going to be someplace for that in their budgets, if we're good at what we do.

BARLOW: My company is in the early stages of doing some stuff with [co-registration]. We've had success in the training area, particularly distance education and hard skills training. There's a lot of opportunity there.

CASTLE: Deb, how do you think business has been?

GOLDSTEIN: I think I agree with David. I'd rather be the voice of reality and reason here. We saw some very serious investment from some companies that in the past three years have not spent a lot of money in the April time period, which we were really excited about. But I still think it's a roller coaster. We're going to see a really robust time in the short term and then it's going to dip. Lets face it, with integrated marketing the pie has shrunk and there are more ways to slice it. We're just one part of it. My feeling is that the impact of Can Spam has been significant. As they tried to work out compliance, a lot of companies that [do] integrated media were just paralyzed and that really affected us. That's the reality. Do I see us coming out of it? Yes, I do. And like everybody else here, my glass is always three-quarters of the way full and I think it's going to recover-this is a cyclical business. People have to market and they will get back in the mail and they will get back into e-mail. E-mail is still the killer media app and I think it will come back in force.

ROBERTS: Our broker friends and clients have told us they did not cut back their budget because of Can Spam, they just delayed it. The good news is people have accelerated their mail plans through the rest of the year. We're seeing a tremendous upsurge in the use of e-mail going forward. From February on the curve has been very strong.

SCHWEDELSON: I'm going to have to disagree with you from what we're seeing, at least, on the Can Spam front. It goes without saying we've had to fight that much harder to bring new mailers and clients into the fold to make up for some of the budgets that have been cut due to Can Spam. And the real issue has been the major mailers, the major email marketers from years past. They're compliant, they're back. Are they renting e-mail lists? Absolutely. Is it even at half the volume that it was last year? No, and they're not saying it's [ever] going to be. Those budgets have been moved elsewhere, they've found other things to do with them. Can Spam has had a long-term effect that at least for the foreseeable future we don't see changing.

Opportunities and Challenges (Cont'd)