Meet the Broker: Jeremy Johnson
Today we meet Jeremy Johnson, vice president of brokerage at Specialists Marketing Services Inc. since Dec. 2006. He started his career in 1997 as an intern at Millard Group Inc. (now Direct Media Millard) where he worked until joining Specialists.
His brokerage specialty areas include publishing, catalogs and both consumer and B-to-B travel.
During his time in the industry, Johnson has noticed a gradual shift away from direct mail to more electronic forms of marketing.
“When I first started, direct mail was a huge piece of everybody’s marketing plan,” he says, noting that continual increases in postage and paper costs has forced marketers to look elsewhere.
Now, electronic direct marketing is becoming more widely used than before.
For about the past year, Johnson says he noticed an increased use of e-mail for prospecting whereas in the past, e-mail was “pretty much house file-oriented.”
Part of the reason for this, he concedes, is the economy, particularly in publishing, which is heavily dependent on space advertising.
“When those advertisers aren’t spending — you’ve got the auto market especially, what with General Motors and Chrysler cutting back — those ads aren’t going in magazines. That trickles down the revenue that [publishers] can spend on direct mail,” he says.
Despite the wider acceptance of e-mail, there have been some longstanding stumbling blocks that may have slowed further acceptance, he says.
“We’ve been successful of late working with some [e-mail] list owners in terms of pricing. That’s always been a huge barrier for some of mailers,” he says. “They just couldn’t get over the $250 per thousand cost and I think a lot of list owners thought they might be able to get that five years ago because there were paper costs involved etc. But it’s clear that the response and the metrics just don’t match up to warrant the $250 per thousand fee.”
Looking forward, Johnson thinks the bad economic times may be on their way out…eventually.
“[The economy] seems to be slowly coming back,” he says, especially among certain clients such as hobby enthusiast magazines.
He adds that cutbacks in this area have been very minor in comparison to large magazines with rate bases of more than million. “We are slowly seeing it start to recover,” he says, pointing to such positive signs such as higher mail quantities or at least a slowdown in spending cutbacks.
He says he looks forward to a second half that will be “okay but not great of course.”
“I keep telling people we’re setting ourselves up for a great 2010 because we have a very low benchmark for 2009, “he says. “As far as 2010 goes, it should be a pretty good year.”
When not brokering lists, Johnson, who lives with his family in Peterborough, NH, likes to hunt and fish, particularly for tuna off the coast of Massachusetts — weather permitting, of course.
