Meet the Broker: Dan Bohlken

Today we meet Dan Bohlken, vice president of business-to-business list brokerage for Direct Media Inc. in Kansas City, KS.

He's been with the company for six years, and was previously a customer of the firm, when he worked for Fred Pryor Seminars and other direct marketers.

On both sides of the fence, Bohlken has done a lot of work in the business seminars market. His brokerage clients include National Seminars Group, National Pen Co., Clemson University and Successories.

"My work has always involved business-to-business lists," he said.

Probably 90% of his brokerage business currently involves cooperative databases, as business consolidation and acquisitions have superseded the number of new businesses start-ups doing traditional postal direct marketing in recent years.

"There aren't a lot of new response lists coming on the market any more," he stressed. "The list universe is shrinking as larger companies buy smaller companies. There's been an incredible amount of consolidation."

Bohlken has observed firsthand some major shifts in the list rental market over the last 20 years. Like many brokers he said the most significant trend has been the shrinking universe of new response files coming on the market.

His life outside of work revolves around his family and pets. He's married and has a son, 10, and a daughter, 12, plus two cats and one dog. His downtime from list brokerage includes playing golf and coaching his son's basketball team.

What advantages or differences do you associate with cooperative databases, compared to renting individual lists?

"It's the cost," said Bohlken. "More companies are putting an emphasis on reducing costs to find better or smarter ways to access lists."

Multi-sourced data from cooperative databases is available for fewer selection charges and there's no added expense for merge purge—like there is when lists are rented individually, he added.

Cooperative databases give mailers access to selected segments drawn from hundreds of lists, rather than choosing 10 or 15 lists to rent separately. Co-op data list is most often used for building statistical models based on RFM data analysis—recency, frequency and monetary variables to lift response rates.

Although only a handful of cooperative databases exist in the business-to-business sector, Bohlken said demand for sourcing data this way has been increasing among B-to-B direct marketers.

One of the main forces driving demand for cooperative data has been corporate consolidation and the need to offset the shrinking universe of new lists coming on the market, he said.

What impact has the Internet had on the list business?

"The Internet has been bad for list hygiene," Bohlken said.

Data matching practices need to be improved for Internet-sourced data in his opinion. Duplicate records are frequently created when orders are received online rather than by phone.

Variations in the names of customers, companies or divisions -- which used to be spotted and updated by live phone reps with access to customer records on computer screens -- are now being entered directly into databases by customers themselves, leading to multiple duplicated records.

Know someone you'd like to suggest for Meet the Broker? E-mail Jim.Emerson@Penton.com