“This online media is no longer new, and should be viewed as an extension of the services that traditional list brokers and managers represent and recommend to their clients,” says Lee Kroll, President, Kroll Direct Marketing.

You can download a free copy of the “2012 Data Card Trends Report” to see how the landscape is changing on our platforms.

It was standing room only last night as 180+ digital media pros packed the Manhattan room of the Marriott Marquis overlooking Times Square. Only expecting 140-150, they had to bring in extra chairs to handle the overflow.

Who would have guessed that the mundane topic of RFPs would draw such a crowd on a Tuesday night in January?  The RFP is certainly a hot topic (or sore subject?) among those in the digital media business.

Online Marketing Network organized the event which was billed as “Learn How to Earn RFP’s and Win Media Business from Top Media Executives.”

The event featured two panel discussions with top media executives including:

• Sarah Rankin, VP, Associate Media Director at Deutsch
• Kallana Warner, Media Supervisor at Media Contacts
• Charles Pinkerton, Partner & Director of Communication Insights at The Media Kitchen
• David Simone, Associate Media Director at MEC
• Matthew Granish, Associate Media Director at DraftFCB
• Jennifer Hartwick, Digital Media Manager at Mindshare
• Jaimie Sparber, Digital Media Manager at G2
• Sheevani Raikundalia, Sales Manager, East Coast Advertising, Washington Post Digital – moderator
• Rob Shore, National Account Manager at Washington Post Digital – moderator

These experts gave advice on topics including:

• “Day in the Life” of a Media Buyer & Planner
• Best Practices for Meeting Requests
• Effective Meetings & Presentations
• Communication & Staying Top of Mind
• Understanding the RFP and Decision Making Process
• How to Make your Proposal Stand Out
• Communication Process & Follow Up
• Managing Client & Agency Relationships

The panels gave dozens of tips on how to properly present a media program to a media planner. For example, “use bullet points” (notice my generous use of bullet points above

One overall theme was how incredibly hard a digital media planner’s job is.  Besides actually getting work done, they “sometimes get 30 calls a day” from ad sales people. The next time a media planner fails to return your call, think about what it’s like to be in their shoes. And work harder to make their life easier.

The other overall theme is how difficult it is for an ad sales person to cut through all that clutter to get noticed. That’s not an easy job and not for someone who can’t deal with rejection and adversity.

As a follow up to the 9 ways the RFP fails in digital media buying, this article shows how today’s digital media landscape has rendered the RFP obsolete.

The RFP process has been used in the advertising business since the beginning.  But the dynamics of the media landscape has changed significantly since then.

50 years ago, in the Mad Men era, there were few media options to choose from.  Think ABC, NBC, and CBS. Budgets were big. Planning cycles were long.  Everyone knew everyone.   It was easy to create your consideration set. The RFP process worked well in this environment of limited and static supply.  We did not have all these problems with the RFP back in those days.

Fast forward 50 years to today. We are in the digital media era. There are tens of thousands of digital media options to choose from and the landscape is evolving every day. Budgets are relatively small. Planning cycles are short. Staffing is a revolving door for both buyers and sellers. We have lots of problems with the RFP.

Today’s problems with the RFP can be traced back to today’s media landscape as follows:

1. False Positives – Smaller budgets and faster planning cycles mean less time to pre-qualify programs. Buyers sometimes take a “shotgun approach” in an effort to avoid omissions. A rule of thumb is to RFP three times as many sellers as you need for your media plan.

2. Omissions – with tens of thousands of options to choose from, it’s practically impossible for a buyer – experienced or not – to find and include all relevant programs in their consideration set

3. Contacts – with tens of thousands of programs and frequent staffing turnover in the sales department, it’s practically impossible for a buyer to keep their contact database complete and up-to-date.

4. Delays – as a result of the shotgun approach, there are many proposals to gather. Some RFPs are ignored or go to the wrong person. The biggest and best sellers often have a backlog.

5. Non-responders – as a defense to being on the receiving end of the “shotgun approach” and knowing they may be “column fodder,” sellers cherry pick which RFPs to which they respond.

6. Bad Formats – In an effort to streamline their proposal process, sellers have each developed their own standard proposal templates.  These templates vary widely from seller to seller.

7. Incomplete proposals –Knowing they may be column fodder, sellers take shortcuts to minimize the amount of time they spend on proposals that they don’t think have a high expected value.

8. Time Consuming – a combination of the problems above make the RFP process time consuming: writing the RFP, finding the right programs for the consideration set, tracking down the contacts, sending the RFPs, responding to the RFPs with proposals, gathering the proposals, reconciling the formats, evaluating the proposals.

9. Expensive – time is money for both buyers and sellers

The RFP continues to be a valuable tool at the line item level in cases where the probability of including a given program in a media plan is high. For example, if the advertiser has successfully used the media program in the past or a high degree of confidence for other reasons, the RFP is useful for getting updates, inventory counts, and negotiated pricing.  However, because of the problems described above, the RFP cannot be expected to source every program in a modern media plan.

The RFP process works well in an environment of well-known and relatively static set of choices. However, the RFP breaks down when there are an overwhelming number of dynamic choices. Today’s digital media landscape is clearly the latter case.  While still useful in certain cases at the line item level, the RFP is not well-suited for creating comprehensive digital media plans.

“The RFP is broken” is often heard among digital media planning/buying and digital ad sales teams (called “buyer” and “seller” in this article). However, the RFP – or Request for Proposal – has remained an ingrained part of the digital media buying process for guaranteed inventory.

This article explores the problems with using the RFP process in digital media buying.

The purpose of the RFP

The proposals that come in response to the RFP provide the buyer with benefits that include:

• Information – Proposals (RFP responses) contain the information a buyer needs to decide whether or not to include a given program in their media plan
• Ideas – proposals sometime present fresh “out of the box” ideas that benefit the advertiser
• Pricing – Proposals often include special negotiated pricing and other special terms
• Inventory – Proposals typically reveal how much inventory is available during the flight of the campaign

How do RFP’s fail?

Buyers and sellers cite the following problems with the RFP:

1. False Positives – programs in the consideration set that are not a good match for the campaign criteria. This wastes time for both the buyer and seller.

2. Omissions – relevant programs missing from the consideration set

3. Contacts – difficulty gathering contact information for sellers from each program.

4. Delays – the RFP process may take two weeks or more to conduct start to finish

5. Non-responders – RFPs that receive a late response or no response at all

6. Bad Formats – proposals come in a variety of formats (e.g. Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel) which creates extra work for the buyer in reconciling and standardization

7. Incomplete proposals – proposals that do not provide the information requested in the questions in the RFP

8. Time Consuming – the RFP process is time consuming for both buyers and sellers. For a buyer, it typically takes 38 hours across 4 job functions to conduct the RFP process. For a seller, it typically takes 4 hours to respond to an RFP with a proposal. A campaign with 10 RFPs consumes 78 hours of work for buyers and sellers.

9. Expensive – the RFP process is expensive for both buyers and sellers. For example, it typically costs a buyer $3,018 per campaign to perform the RFP process. Sellers collectively spend at least as much bringing the total to more than $6,000 per campaign.

With all these problems, you have to wonder why the RFP is relied upon so heavily in the digital media buying process.  Find out in our next post “Why the RFP fails in digital media buying.”

The 1,000 site milestone seemed like a big deal when we hit it last month. But now it seems so yesterday… today we hit another milestone: more than 2,500 sites are now represented in our data card index. Congratulations to the Accounts and Market Intelligences teams for establishing the relationships and doing the research and data entry to hit this goal ahead of schedule.

We’re running at a pace of more than 200 sites per day so it won’t be long before we hit our next milestone: 10,000 sites.

There’s been a lot of talk about how inefficient the process of placing digital advertisements is as compared to TV and other traditional media.

For example, according to Google, “Managing display ad campaigns can take up 28% of the budget in overhead, compared to 2% for TV. Which means for every $100 you spend on display, $28 goes to process management such as negotiation with multiple sites, re-planning, faxing insertion orders, trafficking hundreds of ad tags and so on. Such inefficiencies have impeded the growth of the industry.”

Being process and workflow geeks, we wanted to understand this inefficiency at a  deeper level.  So, we conducted our own study to drill into this from a media agency’s perspective.

The goal of the study was to answer a basic question: “How much does it cost an agency to create and execute a digital media plan?“

We faced our first big challenge right out of the gate. This question is not as simple as it seems because the cost depends on myriad factors.  When we asked “how much?” the answer we kept getting was essentially, “it depends on so many things I could not tell you.”  Dave Smith of Mediasmith was kind enough to enumerate the 17 factors that influence the cost of a media plan. So, to move forward we constrained the inquiry to a specific scenario of a $500,000 media budget buying guaranteed online display inventory on 10 websites with 10 placements each.

The second big challenge we faced was in calculating and presenting the the findings. Just knowing the bottom line cost does not provide much insight. Knowing what drives the cost is where the insights begin. So, we developed a Digital Media Planning Workflow Calculator which is an activity-based costing model.  We refined this model throughout the process and plugged in the data we gathered from digital media planning experts through our interviews.

Finally, we crunched the numbers.

The answer? It costs $40,356 to create and execute a media plan under the $500k scenario.  This works out to about 8% of media spend.

8% of media spend is much lower than Google’s number of 28%. However, I believe their study covered additional activities such as advertiser, creative, and publisher activities while ours was limited to media activities within the agency.  The 8% seems to be “in the ballpark, but a little low” as we validated the findings.  A rule of thumb is 10-12% of media spend varying by media spend.

Where does all that money go? We dissected the process by task and by job function and identified the hot spots.  It’s important to know which job functions are performing the tasks because the costs of job functions vary widely (e.g. Media Director versus Ad Trafficker). The reporting phase is the most time-intensive at 113 hours but the strategy phase is the most cost-intensive at $11,454.55 because of the personnel involved.

There is a tremendous amount of manual labor involved in the process of creating and executing a media plan. We counted 482.5 hours per campaign involving 11 different job functions at an agency. That’s a lot of work and people involved!

To get the detailed analysis supporting the result (or to run your own numbers), download the Digital Media Planning Workflow calculator – it’s free and easy to manipulate in Excel.

First, if you have been following recent NextMark posts, you know we are working on building a database of digital advertising programs along with new apps to improve the digital media planning process.  With the 7.12 release, we are introducing the foundation to enable us to offer multiple applications within a single framework.  While is doesn’t look like much, we’ve added a stripe (see image below) across the top of the application that will eventually be an application switcher.  For now, NextMark users will see an app called Direct Marketing System—which is the name for the current set of capabilities offered under the NextMark brand.

NextMark Application with Stripe

So, what new apps are in the works?  The Digital Media Planner will significantly reduce the amount of time required to create high-quality media plans.  It will also provide access to a growing database of detailed digital advertising programs.  We are also working on Media Magnet, a tool to connect buyers to the digital advertising programs that best match their campaign objectives.

With every release, we aim to increase system stability and usability and 7.12 is no exception.  We’ve addressed more than 20 issues reported by our user community.

One of our ongoing goals at Nextmark is to drive down the transaction costs associated with buying and selling direct mail lists and other marketing programs.  In 7.12, we streamlined some of the key functions related to the Direct Marketing Exchange (DMAX)—a system that provides the ability for trading partners to electronically transmit mailing list orders using a standard protocol.  For more information about DMAX and how organizations can use it to reduce cost and increase business, refer to this post.

For more detail, check out the 7.12 release notes.

1) That “50″ number is already old news; more than 100 publishers are now on board. In the past month alone, another 50+ web publishers have signed on, bringing the count to 107.

2) More than 1,000 website advertising programs from these web publishers are now represented as “data cards” in our advertising program database. In fact, as of today 1,414 data cards have been published:

At the current rate, more than 2,500 of the top website advertising programs will be indexed and available by the end of the year.

Unlike in other media channels, digital media planners have never had a “go to” source of comprehensive information about digital advertising programs. They’ve used myriad tools and countless hours of drudgery to cobble together the information they need to present a professional media plan to their client, the advertiser.

Sure, media planners have long had good tools like comScore and Nielsen to get site metrics such as visitors, page views, and audience profiles. However, site metrics only provide a fraction of the information needed to produce a solid media plan.  Furthermore, site metrics tools are typically disconnected from the media planning system.

As a result, media planners waste a great deal of time tracking down the information they need for their media plan. Did you know that it takes more than 480 hours and costs an agency more than $40,000 to create and execute a media plan? Ouch.

With access to a data card database, a digital media planner gains access to all the information they need to make decisions and to create their media plan. Their life just got a lot better: no more late nights tracking down publisher details and pasting into other systems like Excel and Powerpoint. It’s all available at their fingertips in their media planning system. Now, they can spend more time on publisher relations, strategy, and other high-value activities.

Ad sales representatives from web publishers also gain an advantage by publishing data cards.  By making it easy for the media planner to buy from them, they get an increase in sales leads… and those leads are better qualified. So, they waste less time servicing cold leads and more time closing deals.

A prerequisite to a viable data card database is creating data cards for each and every advertising program. Nobody has ever done this before for digital ad programs. This is a monumental task requiring thousands of phone calls, tons of research, and many person-years of data entry. Basically, it means scaling up the research from a few sites on a single media plan to the tens of thousands of sites that sell guaranteed inventory on all media plans. And, because the market is in constant flux, this sisyphean work never ends.

NextMark is up for this challenge. We’ve done this before. We’ve published and maintain more than 110,000 data cards for other media channels. We are now taking a page out of our playbook and adapting our technology and methods to digital media channels: online display, mobile display, and online video.

We’re just getting started, but this early progress is a good indication of the value that data cards bring to both media planners and publishers.

Congratulations to our friends and neighbors at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business for being named the #1 business school in the world by The Economist.

Although our sample size is not as big as The Economist’s, I can say first hand that the “Tuckies” certainly deserve this recognition. The interns we’ve hired have all contributed at the executive level on day one.  This past summer Brian Ramirez has helped us to craft our strategic plan to serve digital agencies and made a powerful presentation to our board of directors.

I’m constantly impressed with how clever and hard-working they are. I’ve encountered hundreds of students over the past ten years through Scott Neslin‘s Database Marketing course. In that class, they use our media planning tools to solve cases.  It’s amazing to me how quickly they learn the basics and the nuances of the business. The media plans they develop will rival any pro’s.

To those of you in the business right now, you should either step up your game or hire them because here they come!

Data cards are basically a “media kit on steroids.”  It’s a fresh concept for digital media adapted from a proven method in offline media. It’s a better way to connect with media planners: data cards make it easy for them to discover your media programs and to include them in their media plans.

Don’t miss your chance to gain a first mover advantage… learn more on the data card publisher page.

“We noticed that the majority of our industry is comprised of Past and Future thinkers. There were barely any Present thinkers. The skews were dramatic. To put this into some context, it is Future thinking that drives innovation, the launch of new companies, creativity, sales, and coming up with the “big ideas”. Past thinking drives validation and most likely comprised of our industry’s research and analytics. However, it is the Present thinking that excels at client services, account/project management, strategic planning, operations, systems integration, time management, privacy/data management, process, work flow, budgeting, scope of work, etc. Most of the problems our industry is encountering is due to lack of the right Present thinking attacking these needs.”

The MindTime Framework reveals that present thinkers are good at getting things done. They organize their time and work towards a goal. According to a recent survey, CMOs rate “ability to execute” as their #1 criteria for choosing an outside agency. It’s clear that present thinking people are critical to an agency’s success.

“Long live the Excel spreadsheet as the tool of choice. We speak anecdotally among industry circles and in class about our seemingly lifelong relationship with manual approaches and tools – and with Excel. We have a love-hate relationship with Excel. It turns out that the stats bear this out. But, we are still more manual and Excel-jockeying than we should be, if we want to scale our efforts.”

She cites research by Efficient Frontier that reveals:

“When asked which tools they used to manage both programs together, US marketers most commonly said spreadsheets (59%)—seemingly favoring a simple, and most likely inadequate campaign management solution over more advanced tools…. That’s not to say that marketers aren’t also relying on some form of analytics or management tool in combination: 48% used a marketing analytics tool, 40% used web analytics tools and about a third of marketers relied on either a third-party ad server, business intelligence platform or their own proprietary internal tool.”

Our own research confirms the widespread use of Excel as the “glue” that holds together the process of creating and executing a media plan. There are many tools used throughout the process that provide sources of data, but the media team turns to Excel bring it all together.

Excel is excellent at providing a flexible and easy to use tool for gathering, organizing, and presenting data. However, it has at least two major drawbacks:

1. Excel has no media-specific features.  It doesn’t know what a campaign, placement, impression, or click from any other cell on a spreadsheet.  As such, you have to work harder to set up and populate the spreadsheet.
2. Excel is terrible at storing and re-mixing data.  Sure, you can save your campaign results spreadsheet on your shared drive.  But if you want to know the results for a client over the past two years and that is stored in 50 different spreadsheets, you’ve got a problem.

With our next generation digital media planning tool, we’ve taken on the challenge of building “Excel on steroids.” We want to take the best parts of Excel and extend that with media-specific capabilities that only a database-backed system can provide.

Is the RFP process broken?  Times have changed since it was built for the Mad Men Era: budgets are smaller and cycle times are quicker. It seems a new approach is required for the digital age.

If you are a list or data compiler and would like assistance with this kind of integration, let us know and we’ll work with you to get connected.

The DataWidget

Furthermore, 68% of CMOs feel their agencies are behind the curve on digital interactive media integration.

My key takeaway is that CMOs are looking for help and there’s a big opportunity for agencies who rise to the challenge.  You can find the full report here: The CMO Challenge.

This person will be responsible for establishing, developing, and managing relationships with website publisher, advertising agency, and media broker/management clients.

Click here for the full job description

The most significant change you’ll see relates to the new Data Card Wizard that not only makes it easier for users to add and edit data cards but also enables a new type of data card format for advertising programs.  The data card format is determined by the Media Type, which is chosen on the first panel of the Wizard (see example below).

As you’ll soon see, it is now easier to navigate to specific section of existing data cards and make changes quickly.

Another new feature that reduces the amount of time you’ll spend updating data cards is batch update of key dates.  Now, from a search results page, the ‘valid as of’ and ‘last update’ dates can be updated and applied to one or more records displayed on the page.

So, log in and check it out and for a complete list of changes in 7.11, refer to the release notes.

This is complicated! You’ll find a dozen roles executing 42 steps.  It’s no wonder the cost of executing a digital campaign is so high.

It can be helpful to take a step back and think about how your campaign management tools can help you in the process. For example, the ‘Generate Proposal’ feature in NextMark’s media planning tool can be used as a guide in the preparation of client recommendations. Take a look at the snapshot below for an audience of prospective gardening enthusiasts:

The format (Excel, PDF, or RTF) allows the creator of the recommendation to determine the level of interaction the end user may have. For example, while a PDF (Portable Document Format) may be appealing, it does not allow for easy editing and customization of the final output. However, a spreadsheet (Excel) workbook can be customized, edited, enhanced, and even integrated with other Microsoft Office programs like PowerPoint. It provides a lot of flexibility, not only for viewing but also for analysis.

And of course, there is also the RTF (Rich Text Format) which is easily read by Microsoft Word. While this may be a common format among traditional direct marketers, it provides fewer benefits due to the limitations of word processing applications. The content of data cards varies due to the depth and breadth of each media program or mailing list. This creates issues related to pagination and alignment that can be more easily resolved with alternative output formats.

The content options enable the creator to generate media and list recommendations that are relevant, while excluding information that may be considered proprietary from a media brokerage perspective. For example, a recommendation made by a list broker for a catalog marketing client may include additional segements, selects, and profile information for discussion purposes related to refinement and targeting. However, the manager information may be suppressed intentionally to keep focused on the value that the media broker brings to the campaign management process.

Additional insight may be applied as well. With access to the mailer usage database, media brokers can also leverage the experiences of others and help speed up the decision-making process. It’s a great way to uncover new media to test based on what has worked for others. It is often the not-so-obvious recommendations that outperform the market average for response and lifetime value (LTV).

Keep these three things in mind as a guide for media and list recommendations, but don’t feel like you need to change your personal style. What’s most important is what sets you apart as a trusted advisor for your clients.

Hope this was helpful…

Chris

]]> http://www.nextmark.com/2011/08/creating-media-and-list-recommendations/feed/ 1 http://www.nextmark.com/2011/07/nextmark-releases-2q11-data-card-quality-report/ http://www.nextmark.com/2011/07/nextmark-releases-2q11-data-card-quality-report/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:22:24 +0000 Chris DeMartine http://www.nextmark.com/?p=3395 Hanover, NH – July 13, 2011 – NextMark, Inc. a leading provider of direct marketing tools and resources, today published its second quarter 2011 Data Card Quality Report. The report categorizes list management firms based on the number of titles managed, and provides an average data card quality score across each company’s list management portfolio.

Among the findings were 16 list management companies that posted double-digit improvements when compared to the first quarter of 2011. A total of 89 list management companies got an ‘A’ (90.0 or greater) for data card quality in Q2 2011, and 25 of those companies got a perfect score (100).

It is important to note that data card quality does not reflect list quality, but it does measure the completeness and recency of information about the list. This helps to ensure that direct marketers have the information they need to make good prospect list purchasing decisions.

NextMark publishes the top 50 ranking report on a quarterly basis. The next report will be published in October 2011.

Individual data card scores are calculated using a weighted average of thirteen attributes, with an emphasis on recent updates. A list manager’s score is the average of all the data card scores in their portfolio. The first quarter 2011 Data Card Quality Report includes a ranking of list management companies by data card quality.  The top companies for each category are listed below:

Category I (500+ Titles)

American List Counsel
B2B
Complete Mailing Lists
ListBargains.com
Lighthouse List Company

Category II (250 – 499 Titles)

ConsumerBase
Media Source Solutions
Dunhill International
Great Lakes List Management
List Connection, Inc.
PCS Mailing List Company
Take 5 Solutions
Ethnic Technologies
Integrated Business Services

Category III (100 – 249 Titles)

W.S. Ponton
BMI Elite
eTargetMedia.com
List Service Direct, Inc.
Political Fundraising Lists
Charles Moore Associates

Category IV (50 – 99 Titles)

Key Marketing Advantage
NCRI List Management
Profile America List Company
Media Baby
Paramount Lists

For a complete report of the top list managers, including risers and fallers, visit NextMark’s web site: http://www.nextmark.com/media-sales/data-card-quality-report.

About NextMark, Inc.

NextMark’s mission is to help you successfully reach your market. We provide information and technology that powers the market for addressable media and enables media planning, media operations, and media sales. NextMark is a privately held corporation headquartered in Hanover, New Hampshire USA with its Market Intelligence Group located in Edmond, Oklahoma and on the web at www.nextmark.com.

Click here to download your free copy of this list industry white paper.

Special thanks to all who contributed to this research product including:

Ray Schultz, President, TellAllMarketing

Lenny Medico, Senior Vice President of List Management, Lake Group Media

Ben Perez, former CEO of Millard Group

Fran Green, President of SMART Data Solutions, ALC

Pete Carney, CEO, Carney Direct Marketing

Geoff Batrouney, Executive Vice President, Estee Marketing Group

David Schwartz, President, Executive Confidential Organizational Consultants

Mary Jo Yafchak, Vice President of Product Management, Acxiom

Don Hinman, Senior Vice President, Epsilon Targeting

Mark Zilling, Senior Vice President, MeritDirect

Charles Morgan, former CEO, Demographics, Inc.

Tom Berger, CEO, Cross Country Computer

Mitch Rubin, CEO, Applied Information Group

David Kanter, President, AccuList USA

Eric Smith, CEO, ListFusion/DataTree

John Papalia, CEO, Statlistics

Carolyn Woodruff, Senior Broker

James Johnson, Advisor, International Direct Response

Lon Mandel, CEO, Specialists Marketing Services

Robert Sher, Principal, RK Sher & Associates

Marlies Duke, Vice President, 4Cite Marketing, LLC

To learn more click here for the full position description.

This role will include technical support, client training, managing knowledge resources, and quality assurance testing.

To learn more click here for the full position description.

This person would be responsible for defining product features based on customer and market research, developing an ongoing business plan for all web and mobile products, and coordinating the non-technical aspects of periodic software releases. He or she would be a key contributor in decisions about new products, product pricing and positioning, and the overall strategic plan of the company.

Click here for the full job description

The growth picture for direct media is not so bright:

“Direct media, which the firm defined as Internet Yellow Pages, paid search, lead generation, print directories and direct mail, will perform more poorly than mass media for a second consecutive year. However, direct media advertising revenue will ultimately grow at a greater pace than mass media advertising revenue in the long term, the firm said. Direct media advertising revenue will grow 3.9% by 2016, compared with the 3.7% growth in mass media advertising revenue in that time.”

Direct mail, once again surprises the analysts because it bucks the trend of other traditional media and continues to grow: “Direct mail did a lot better than we thought,” said Feldman. “It will grow each year within the next five years. But compared to electronic media, direct mail and directories are at a disadvantage.”