Today's generation of marketing directors must meet a whole new set of management expectations. And they are presented with an ever more complex array of options and strategies for reaching customers. A new joint venture formed by Perkins Nichols Media and Cwi Associates will help marketing directors get maximum impact from marketing budgets (and marketing partnerships) by identifying strongest market opportunities and recommending how best to use media and the options we call the new direct marketing mix.

Management expects Marketing Directors to stay on top of market share (and positioning within current markets) while also staying aware of new market opportunities. At the same time, they must stay in touch with current customers via one-on-one data base marketing while finding strong marketing partners in an effort to leverage current marketing budgets. As if that were not enough, they must also effectively deal with the increasingly fragmented world of media.

Bill Perkins, President, Perkins Nichols Media offers this explanation of the marketing challenges prompting the new joint venture with Cwi Associates:

"Advertisers are finding that the proliferation of new media and programming and channels within existing media has fragmented audiences and lowered the return on investment to traditional advertising. Our clients are trying to cover more bases with the same or marginally more money. Result: it costs more each year to reach with impact the next new customer while competitors woo their best customers and beat them to new markets."

Dave Cwi of Cwi Associates notes the growing availability of market data useful to marketing directors. And this includes not only data on individual media but information about individual households, including information that can be "mined" from purpose-built customer files.

"We have amazing tools for analyzing communication options while we also evaluate markets. If someone wants to target a particular lifestyle or decision maker we know the mix of options likely to reach them effectively. And we can even hand them a mailing list organized by probability of responding to a mail offer. Beyond that, we can tell them who to join up with in cross promotions because the partner caters to the targeted market; and whether that market is big enough to support their expectations for market response. And we complement this with the development of client customer files for one-on-one marketing which can be compared to our larger lists to find new customers or mined to generate more revenue from existing customers by keeping them loyal or selling them more."

Both men agree that "numbers do not tell the whole story" and emphasize the new group's deep experience in the actual practice of advertising and promotion. Bill Perkins puts it this way:

"You need to have the experienced perspective to know a good opportunity from a not so good opportunity. You need to have the experience to tell clients that a particular medium or partner is not good at delivering the results they seek or that their budget is not large enough to be effective. Perhaps they are better off doing a cross promotion to leverage their budget. And we can help them to find partners and do that."

David Cwi notes that sometimes it is best to make haste slowly.

"We like to see clients take a step back and evaluate what is working and what isn't within their current marketing mix before chasing rainbows. They need to know the impact of a reallocation of the marketing budget on current programs that are working just fine."

The joint venture management team brings over 100 years of client and business experience to each assignment. As David Cwi sees it:

"We are accustomed to people 'betting the farm' on our professional judgments. Their faith in our due diligence is forcing us to 'raise the bar'. We are a good compliment to Perkins Nichols and I'm excited about the new venture."

Bill Perkins echoes this "take" on the new generation of multi-media and multi-channel marketing communications.

Perkins Nichols is one of the nation's oldest media services firms, serving advertisers and agencies for more than 20 years. The firm pioneered use of computer assisted analysis of market and media data for us the media planning process.

In the last 15 years, Cwi Associates has provided strategic assessments of market opportunities, data base driven target marketing services, and cross-promotion development services for the sporting goods, retirement housing, and resort/hospitality industries among others.