I believe the DM press has a rather myopic vision of the list business with its continued focus on a handful of major firms. It's a mistake to characterize any company that's not part of the big four as mom-and-pop shops (Direct Hit, October). On the list management side, I can think of quite a few companies that are not among the big four that do a superb job and are largely ignored by the DM press.

The same can be said of list brokers. We are not mom-and-pop, and while we may be dwarfed by the staffs of larger companies, we have managed to develop an impressive client base. But we do compete successfully. How do we do this?

We have to be innovative to survive and introduce new programs that we feel will benefit our clients; we have to be real marketing partners with our clients as opposed to just saying it; and we have to be able to partner with other marketing firms to bring our clients so-called best-in-vendor solutions, as well as move quickly when an opportunity develops.

It would be interesting at some point to have a roundtable in Direct on the smaller service companies to see how each approach their work (list brokerage, list management, search, merge/purge service bureaus) and how we all manage to compete successfully with the major firms in this space.
Jeff Kobil
Co-CEO
LDS Group Inc.
New York