The Name Industry

The deluge of advertising that floods the mails -- and never seems so insist ent as during the holiday season -- some times infuriates by its bulk as much as it influences by its appeal. Each year the public is hit by an onslaught of 48 billion direct-mail ads, and the business of compiling mailing lists has become a highly automated industry made up of dozens of firms that spare no effort to capture another name. This year they will gross close to $1 billion renting names and addresses to anyone who has anything to sell. Lists can be rented with the names of 221,782 doctors, 2,476 patent lawyers, 18 safety-pin makers, 41 zoos, Cadillac owners and every American named Murphy (50,000). On the average, each mailing nets less than a 2% response, but that is enough to pro duce $30 billion in mail sales.

Virtually every adult American can figure that he is on at least 20 different lists, from mail-order houses to the phone company. The cycle starts before birth, when more aggressive members of the industry pay off hospital personnel for the names of expectant mothers that they can sell to diaper-service companies and baby photographers. The child joins a list in his own right the first time he sends in a cereal box top, makes it again at high-school graduation when his name is gleaned from a yearbook or supplied by a cap-and-gown manufacturer. From then on, every time he registers his car, makes the telephone directory, buys a home, rents an apartment, joins a book club, contributes to a charity, shops by mail or takes out a credit card, his name is apt to be noted by some listmaker. No matter how much he may regret it, his name is a marketable commodity, rented for 2-c- to 3-c- each time it is used.

Tidy Income. Companies that accumulate lists fall into two clear-cut categories. One is made up of firms that produce lists as a by-product of their regular business--magazines, gift houses, professional associations, book and record clubs, credit-card firms, charities. They make a tidy side income (as much as $250,000 a year for an active list of 1,000,000 names) by renting them out through some 30 U.S. list brokers. Industry sources estimate that the Diners Club makes more than $350,000 a year circulating its members' names.

In the other category are firms that diligently compile lists to rent. The largest by far is Detroit's R. L. Polk & Co., which can supply up to 120 million names broken down into hundreds of categories. Polk works mostly from names it collects from state automobile registration certificates, can supply addresses of all Ford owners in Texas, including those who have bought a car within 40 days. Reuben H. Donnelley Corp. also works with auto registrations, in addition has a list of 55 million addresses without names, making possible broadside mailings to just about every "Occupant" in well-populated areas.

Drawing the Line. Manhattan's O. E. Mclntyre and the Mail Advertising Corp. of America in Lincoln, Neb., cull names from the 5,000 phone books in the U.S. Like the other big list compilers, they match the names by computer with data from the Census Bureau so that they can break down neighborhoods by average income, price of homes, likely number of children, education levels. Most responsive to mailing-list pitches: families with fathers earning from $6,000 to $9,000 in the West and Southwest. Whirring computers can sort out remarkable detail, so that American Motors dealers, for example, can mail to everyone living near a new Rambler buyer and ask him: "Did you notice your neighbor's new car?" The big listmakers draw the line at some requests. Mclntyre refused to consider an offer from an Australian bachelor for the names of U.S. widows worth $1,000,000 or more.

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