Agency to provide total deal

By DITA DE BONI

Advertising and marketing agencies are moving in two opposing directions at present: the bundling of services into one-stop shops or the unbundling of services to specialists.

For Pacific InterMedia - launched last night in Auckland - the answer is clear: retailers and their advertisers need a central provider to measure the huge variety of direct-marketing efforts that companies now employ.

Direct response is anything customers do when actively responding to advertising. Replying to a print coupon, submitting an internet form or ringing an 0800 number are three of the most common mechanisms for advertisers to measure how effectively they are reaching their target audience.

Pacific InterMedia has spent 10 years and $6 million bringing their fledgling direct-response business to fruition. The Parnell company will manage and coordinate all forms of customer response, carry out market research, build customer databases, facilitate payments and dispatch products, information and competition prizes.

It can also provide feedback to advertisers and their clients while ads are running by "pooling" the various responses into one database.

Instead of focusing solely on e-commerce services and solutions to measure the effectiveness of internet offers, Pacific says it is also important to target different groups with different ways of responding.