Win With Vin

Not that he needs our endorsement, but we sympathize with Vin Gupta in his fight to keep the scavengers at Dolphin from horning their way onto the InfoUSA board.

It’s a takeover play, pure and simple, and no good can come of it for direct marketers.

If a hostile board were to replace or hamstring Gupta as CEO, that would be the beginning of the end of a great DM service enterprise, in our view.

We’ve all heard the Horatio Alger tale about how Gupta started out. It has the virtue of being true.

He built InfoUSA with grit and vision, growing it from a small compiling firm into an information giant. And he did what almost no large firm has been able to do: Acquire and hold on to a list company (several, actually).

Dolphin, an investment firm that has made one prior pass at InfoUSA, will have to look hard to find a resume like that.

We’ve seen it many times when outsiders take over a DM firm. Typically, they bring in an empty suit who starts gutting the company. Trusted retainers leave, taking the institutional memory with them. The clients suffer.

At some point, the suit makes a media tour, and reporters get to see what a fraud he is. He talks for an hour, mouthing half-baked ideas out of the Jack Welch handbook. Then the magic moment arrives and someone asks him about direct marketing.

Duh, what’s that? He has to turn to his PR flack for help.

In contrast, Gupta knows his business at every level. He can walk through his compiling unit and tell in an instant if people are doing their jobs. And he can personally sell any product his firm offers.

Maybe a born entrepreneur like Vin shouldn’t have gone public. But it shows you how far our information services industry has come: Years ago, it didn’t attract this kind of sleazy attention.

And it’s not just InfoUSA—we feel the same way about the sharks that were trying to get their teeth into Acxiom.

To disclose facts that are already transparent, InfoUSA and its units advertise in Direct and all the DM trades. In our case, though, they also manage our lists and perform other services, so we are a fair-sized client.

Like any vendor, Gupta has competitors. We’re not saying his products are the best or only ones on the market—that’s for you to decide.

What we are saying is that he is the best person to run InfoUSA. And so we advise the fence-sitters in next week’s board election: Vote the Vin ticket.