Bob Blackman

Hi.  My name is Bob Blackman.  I'm President and CEO of AmazingMail.com.  We are located in Scottsdale, Arizona.  We consider ourselves to be a marketing services organization with an emphasis on print.

That's really a new description for us.  It's evolved over the last four or five years, but it's evolved with the changes that are happening in our industry.  Originally, or we were one of the earliest web-to-press-to-print companies.  We started doing this in 1999 and as the industries developed we've had to sort of reinvent ourselves a few times and we're now going through the latest evolution in our business, which is to convert our mindset from being a product-based mindset to more of a marketing services mindset.

We all talk about or we ask the question what is a marketing services company -- what do they do?  I think that what we are going through now illustrates what that means in that five years ago we talked about we could print and mail the next the day.  We had four colors, four over four.  We could mail first class mail or standard mail or G10 all those sorts of things.

And what we were really providing our customers was a product, but what we've realized over the last few years that a lot of people can do that but where our customers need help is making that marketing expense effective, not just getting it done.  Not just being the vehicle to implement it, but becoming part of the process that maximizes the effect of that campaign.

And so our orientation with customers now is to ask them what are you trying to achieve that.  How are we going to know if we are successful?  So, how are we going to measure it?  How can we test the marketplace in four or five different ways to see which process creates the best result and walk them through that process?  And we've found to our amazement that people generally, that are doing marketing, really don't understand the factors that are going to change the effectiveness of the campaign that they're launching.

They know they want to do direct mail or they think they know they want to do direct mail.  They've got a $5,000 budget and so they're going to do their very best with that $5,000 but they really aren't analyzing their targeting, they're really not analyzing or designing their mail piece appropriately, they're not necessarily thinking about multimedia because not only can we mail we can also provide e-mail services, we can also provide text services, we can also build landing pages, PURLs, websites, all that sort of -- all of those services for the company to make a package that results in the best return on their investment.

You know, it's difficult to take a company or it's challenging to take a company that had such an emphasis on product and we're so proud of our product and how wonderful it was and that you could do this and that and the other thing with our product to get them to change that emphasis to well what are the results of what you're doing and what the money that you're spending.

Another part of this is I think that historically people that have been in the direct mail business have been a little bit ashamed of what they do.  Yes, yes, where all junk mail that goes into your mailbox.  There are also, I think, historically -- there are also historically afraid of the results, and that's a terrible situation to be in.  You know, it's a bit like Toyota building cars and selling to people and saying, "I don't want to hear anything more about it.  You know, you've bought it, it's yours, see you later."

And as a marketing services provider with an emphasis on print, we just can't afford to do that.