NextMark

SRDS sale gives WPP an unfair advantage

On Tuesday, Nielsen announced its intention to sell SRDS to WPP Group as part of a big asset swap agreement. Like many in the direct marketing industry, I am concerned about how this deal changes the competitive landscape.

This affects the direct marketing industry because SRDS provides a research system that is used for making mailing list purchasing decisions and formulating media plans. List managers use SRDS to promote their lists. List brokers and mailers use SRDS to make list selections.

WPP Group is a huge advertising agency holding company with an estimated 100,000 employees and £6.18 billion revenue in 2007. A big part of WPP's revenue is commissions from media purchases done by their stable of advertising agencies. It's a good strategy for WPP to buy SRDS because it will give them better insight into media purchases that happen outside of WPP. They can use SRDS' database to better calculate their market share and to develop laser-focused strategies to acquire the share they don't already own.

If I were a list broker, I'd be really nervous about this.

After all, list brokers compete with WPP agencies for their commissions (i.e. their livelihood). If WPP owns their list research system, it would provide WPP with powerful insights that enable them to steal the business away from list brokers and move those commissions to WPP agencies.

Imagine if your competitor could see all your research and proposals before you publish them. They would eat your lunch!

That's why we at NextMark fundamentally believe that anyone who owns such a system needs to be industry neutral. Our business model is predicated on independence and neutrality. In order for the industry to work efficiently, the industry's technology infrastructure must provide a level playing field. No competitor should own the "marketplace" or any part of it.

Don't you agree?

Direct Media activates website with MarketMax Pro

Direct Media just relaunched the managed lists section of their website using NextMark's MarketMax Pro data card publishing service. Direct Media supplied the graphic design. NextMark supplied the technology to manage the content. Their ~1,300 data cards are now automatically updated, indexed, and searchable. Direct Media has one of the biggest portfolios of lists available -- maybe there's a perfect list for you? Take a look.

The cost of DMA*08

As I promised in my previous post about DMA*08, here is a tally of our costs for six of us from NextMark to exhibit at the DMA*08 conference:

Item	Cost
10x10 booth space	$3,995
Booth furniture	$1,490
Booth shipping	$502
Phone	$282
Plants	$66
Registrations	$450
Hotels	$3,085
Airfare	$2,218
Food	$879
Banner Stand	$560
Taxi	$388
Personal Car	$343
Parking	$231
Total	$14,489

Ours is a modest setup... 10x10 popup booth. We do our best to keep the expenses down, but a it's hard to do because the prices at the conference are a rip-off. 

We worked hard in advance of the conference to get the most from it.  As a result, we had 60 scheduled meetings at the show.  Those meetings and other unscheduled conversations led to 41 sales opportunities.  Not bad.

Doing the math... $2,415/person, $241/meeting, and $353/opportunity.

Now our challenge is to turn those opportunities into sales.  That will be the subject of a future posting once we've let these have a chance to come to fruition.