A Natural Progression?

Sewage Treatment Plant Operator to Circulation Manager?

By
Wednesday, January 2, 2008

By Jeff Hartford, audience development director, Red 7 Media

[Sometimes you need to go far afield to land a story, and sometimes just over to the office down the hall. This month, we posed the question to Jeff Hartford, Red 7 Media’s own audience development director, who is one of the b-to-b circulation community’s best-known figures.—Ed]

What do you do after graduating college with a degree in Environmental Studies? Becoming a circulation manager does not seem to be a natural career path. And back in the late 70's, who even heard of circulation, or for that matter controlled circulation publications? So after working two years at a civil service job running a waste water treatment plant, and dealing with men who thought nothing of shutting down at 4pm and opening up a few cold beers, I decided to make a change.

The lure of New York City appealed to me and I interviewed for a job that required a technical aptitude, some marketing knowledge and supervisory experience. It promised good benefits, a fast paced environment and some travel. But are week long trips to Hightstown, NJ and Des Moines, IA, while staying in Red Roof Inns really anyone's ideal of travel? I took the job anyway and became a BPA auditor.

It was at BPA that I, along with many of my contemporaries, caught the “circulation bug.” I learned the ropes from people like Joe Foley, Maxx Maconnichie, Michael Marchesano and Glenn Hansen—back when Glenn was a lowly supervisor and would join us auditors for a few Heinekens after a long week. I also learned the real secrets of circulation from veterans like Barry Green, Bill McMillan, Mike Oberman and the late Elmer Dalton.

But one of the best benefits to the BPA experience, besides travel, were the friends you made. To this day, I am still friends with two auditors from my graduating class of 1980.

The Golden Years

With BPA experience you are equipped with the knowledge necessary to become either a circulator, an ad salesperson (if you can take that type of rejection), or as one of my fellow auditors did, a house painter. I was lucky enough to land a job at Medical Economics and it was there that I learned from Scott Rockman that there is much more to being a circulator than dealing with BPA.

The analytical side of your brain now must share time with the creative side, as marketing becomes an important aspect of the job. That was back during what I call the “Golden Years” of publishing. When you would get a 25-40 percent response rate to a cover wrap (I once actually got a 52 percent response). You did two-to-three wraps, one direct mail effort and then, at the end of the cycle, maybe a small telemarketing effort and you met your goals.

Some circulators stay at one company for the majority of their careers and some move from job to job. I fall into the latter group and have gone from Med Ec to Cowles Business Media to Knowledge Industry Publications, The Deal, Haymarket Media, and now Red 7 Media. With every job I have taken, there are new challenges.

More Work, Stagnant Budgets

As circulators, we have gone from using the fax to email, voucher packages and double post cards, driving traffic to Web sites and using key words. Email newsletters are now the rage, and it seems like a week does not go by that I do not receive a call from some new telemarketing firm or email list company. Our marketing plans have gone from three or four promotions a year to, in some cases, over 20 with different list segments and different types of promotions depending on how each segment responds.

Fulfillment has gone from having to wait a week for a list select, to using Web interfaces to receive up-to-the minute counts and list pulls at a push of a button. And who of us is not up to our necks in building some type of customer database?

Most recently, we have gone from being called circulators to audience development professionals with expanded duties of developing files for more than just our print publications. And all this while our budgets have remained stagnant or grown with modest cost -of-living increases.

But this is what keeps circulation so exciting. If it was just the same old thing year in and year out, I probably would have gone into house painting, or I would still be drinking a cold one every day at 4 at some treatment plant. Come to think about it, that might be a nice idea once in awhile —especially now as our audit issues close rapidly approach.