Yeck Brothers Co., Dayton, OH, has expanded its database services with the launch of a new data and information marketing division.
The new unit will be headed by Sue Hardin of ISI Data Services, Dayton, who has worked with Yeck as a vendor for 11 years.
“Yeck has always done a good job managing databases. I think what I bring is design and development capabilities.” Hardin said.
The agency, whose major national clients include John Deere, Pitney Bowes, NCR, Lexis-Nexis, BellSouth and Ingersoll-Rand, has seen its clients demand a variety of database services.
“Many clients, particularly in the financial sector, already have a customer database. They might have a huge database but they might have a smaller segment that they want to market to for a frequency program, for example,” said Molly Chillinsky, senior account executive. “Others might not have a database and they might want to build one but have only talked about it. Sue Hardin has a lot of experience building databases from the ground up. We can talk to them about what information they need and who needs access.”
The agency plans to sell most of its database services as part of a more complete marketing package but also expects to work with clients interested in strictly database work. Initially, the new division will probably work with clients in industries that Yeck has focused on, such as finance, hi-tech, utilities and agriculture, Chillinsky said, but “Sue Hardin's experience is more broad-based, so she may bring us into other areas.”
While the division will begin by working with corporate marketing directors, it also may offer its services to agencies or agency-related associations that want to offer database work to their clients, Hardin said.
Hardin sees the unit's challenge as helping turn the conceptual ideas and language of marketing directors into the process-oriented language of information services departments.
“The way I always describe it is that marketing departments are concept driven. They have ideas of where the company is going, but those ideas keep changing as new things develop,” she said. “Information services is very detail oriented and black and white. It's all about taking what marketing departments want to do, where they want to go and where their thoughts are and building the details on the IS side.”
For her part, Hardin made the switch from an external vendor to lead the new division because she saw it as an opportunity for growth.
“I wanted to go with a company more national in scope — and when I looked at the clients I've worked with that have been most challenging, a lot of them came from Yeck,” she said.
There is expected to be some hiring involved in the building of the new division, but not until farther down the road.
“They have a good core group in place both from a human resources and a hardware/software standpoint,” she said. “As we take on clients and the business expands, we will be doing more hiring, but for now we can do everything we need to.”
