“But we’ve got a lot of anecdotal evidence that, participant by participant, our results are substantially above outside list rentals.”
“Our participants mail to the same households that are often represented when rent a list as well,” Dice continues. A new analytic group, he says, provides a forum in which participants can share results. Lillian Vernon is now testing the co-op for the first time, and a major club mailer is considering testing it as well.Ĭhris Dice, president and chief operating officer of Abacus Corp., concurs that while the Denver company does not track response database-wide, evidence indicates that Abacus provides a “very nice lift” for participants. We depend on the Alliance and have a vested interest in making the cooperative work.” “Our dilemma, quite frankly, is getting names,” says Jeff Parnell, CEO of London’s Eximious, which reports less than $10 million in annual sales. Many participants agree that the database continues to be a vital part of their circulation plans, producing large quantities of prospective names at an affordable price. (Abacus Alliance is a larger and more widely used database which has drawn more comment than Z-24.)Ībacus does have its defenders. (Because the Alliance dropped out of the Alliance last spring because of declining response, according to a list brokerage source. Marsha Pandora, circulation manager for cataloger Cuddledown of Maine, says that Abacus’ Alliance and Experian’s Z-24 databases are “still working well enough for us to continue to use them, but they are not working as well as they have in the past.”Īnd at least one large mailer dropped out of the Alliance last spring because of declining response, according to a list brokerage source. Those who would speak on the record and off, however, describe how the Alliance’s performance has slipped during the past six to 18 months. The primary on-the-record critics are list brokers, who have little love for the co-op despite recent efforts by Abacus to provide them with financial incentives. However, this is hard to document because most catalogers refuse to speak for attribution. There are rumblings that the Abacus Alliance isn’t serving up the response it once did, and that its decline is forcing some mailers to reduce their slice of the cooperative database.
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