Mercury, a leading direct marketing company based in Rhode Island recently hosted its first in a series of many roundtable forums that will begin to change the way companies communicate with their customers. The event, “Mercuralia,” a festival of ideas, was designed by the team at Mercury to bring together dozens of industry leaders to discuss the changes in traditional marketing and the relevance of Social Media. Representatives from Cox Communications, Comcast, AAA Southern New England, Boston University, New England Tech, APC and others were on hand to listen to keynote speaker Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz and Allan Tear from Aptus Collaborative speak about the emerging themes in Social Media and the importance of companies’ awareness and eventual response.
When asked about the purpose of the forum, Steve Cronin, President and CEO of Mercury said, “We have noticed a huge fundamental shift in our industry, and our need to evolve with it. We realize our customers’ needs are changing, and they are looking to us for answers. Over the past few years we have made a calculated effort to add new technologies to keep up with an ever-changing industry. A few years ago we added pURL (Personal URL) technology to our service offerings along with web-to-print and Transpromo technology. We have also added to our manufacturing capabilities by investing in new Digital Printing equipment, Intelligent Inserting, Gluing capabilities and extended our bindery department by bringing Perfect Binding in house.”
Steve continued, “We recently have made the commitment to our customers to offer strategic campaign planning and data analytic services. This is where the direct marketing industry is going and we are poised to respond. As a result, we have hired Anna Barcelos to head up our Marketing Strategy & Analytics division. Anna comes to Mercury with over 15 years of high-level marketing strategy and analytics experience. We have also hired Stephen Etchells, a veteran strategic brand marketer who is joining us from the full service advertising business. Stephen has worked with a variety of companies across a wide spectrum of industries. We believe Anna and Stephen will be able to address the evolving needs of our customers in an unparalleled way. We are listening. We’re responding. The fact that we are growing in this economy says a lot and we believe it’s events like “Mercuralia” and the exploration of new advancements in our industry that will allow Mercury to continue to grow.”
As attendees prepared to return to their offices at the end of the event, Michael Brown from Cox Communications posted on the Mercuralia event site, “A very interesting event. Not long ago I attended the eTech Summit in Hartford CT. The theme was social networking but the presentations were very superficial. I think I went to the Festival of Ideas expecting much the same sort of thing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were some very practical ideas that dealt with how Social Networks could be used as a new and powerful marketing tool.”
Nick DeCesare, VP of Sales & Marketing at Mercury, adds, “This was just the beginning of a very long conversation. A conversation that we will actually be continuing on the Mercuralia community site. We realize that there are still lots of questions and lots of ideas to discuss. Mercuralia really is just the beginning for us. We want the world to know we are more then a print & mail house. It is time to evolve!”
About Mercury
Based in Pawtucket, RI, Mercury is a one-to-one direct marketing services provider of data modeling and analytics, personalized URLs, variable data printing (VDP), web to print, and traditional print and mailing capabilities. Contact Mercury for more information.