At an angel event in Seattle today I learned about a start-up that wants to reinvent list marketing: the practice of renting/selling and buying lists of names for the purposes of demand generation. MarketFish plans to compete directly against the highly fragmented world of list brokers, list managers and database providers. They want to offer accountability, predictability and lots of efficiencies and thereby disrupt this notoriously inefficient and time-consuming process — “the dark side” of demand gen.
Anyone who has ever rented a list and then been frustrated at poor response rates and out-of-date contacts knows this whole area is ripe for reinvention. Yes, lead nurturing is very cool and offers lots of potential, but ROMI and superior conversion metrics are highly dependent on the quality of the list going into the funnel. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.
It will be a big coup for marketers if MarketFish can pull it off.
Whether this will make direct marketing, from the consumer’s perspective, any smarter or more relevant is a big unknown – but that’s not MarketFish’s mission.
They’ve got some pretty impressive names on their board of advisers, including early players from aQuantive and Google, so their access to intellectual capital and experience-based next-gen marketing DNA should be a real asset during their formative years.
