It’s hard to believe that 25 years has passed since PDV first began delivering direct marketing in April 2000. On one hand, 25 years feels like a long time, while on the other, April 2000 feels like the recent past to some of us! This was the year that the Tate Modern opened, along with the Millennium Bridge (AKA the ‘Wobbly Bridge’), and the Freedom of Information Act was passed. Big Brother launched on Channel 4, revolutionising reality TV (for better or for worse is for you to decide).
For the pop trivia fans amongst you, Mel C, Westlife and Craig David were dominating the charts in April, while for data fans, the ‘Big Number Change’ also took place that month, introducing new, longer area codes for various cities including London and Coventry.
Generating leads from the beginning
Meanwhile, PDV was starting life as an online lead generation company. Back then, its primary business was running online competitions that would generate leads for all types of clients.
The flagship brand was Fair Exchange, an exciting games and rewards website. As the name suggests, it provided consumers with a range of competitions and rewards, in exchange for sharing their data for marketing purposes.
Fair Exchange quickly grew in popularity, reaching Hitwise’s No. 1 ranking for market share for UK Entertainment – Competitions websites, ahead of The National Lottery! Plus, somewhat remarkably, it’s DailyDraw Game created not one but two £1m prize winners. PDV was a bit of a trailblazer back then!
At the same time, it’s competitor Data Locator Group (DLG) was doing broadly the same thing but predominantly over the phone: pioneering telephone surveys on people’s marketing preferences.
Both companies excelled at what they did and grew rapidly before they were both acquired by parent company DM Limited in 2008.
PDV became the face of lead gen
Under the new ownership, PDV was put to the forefront of all lead generation activities: capturing fresh data and delivering it to clients as real-time leads, helping them convert interested prospects without delay. DLG became the powerhouse of the group’s data rental activities, supplying data for large scale direct mail, email and telemarketing campaigns.
The streamlined businesses continued innovating products and multi-channel solutions that sharpened data quality, prompting the addition of Transactis in 2017. The direct marketing cooperative helped the group to further support the marketing activities of some of the UK’s leading mail order, catalogue and multi-channel retailers.
Developing the PDV proposition
Around the implementation of GDPR in May 2018, it became clear that first party data would command a more prominent role within the marketing industry. Nigel Goldthorpe, MD, and Graham Tomblin, Group Sales Director, began to develop the proposition around three key principles to:
- Help brands improve their audience targeting.
- Optimise campaign performance.
- Enable clients to harness value from data insight
PDV became the front-facing business, and the proposition began to shift towards that of a data-driven direct marketing agency model, fulfilling the needs of clients who want to acquire more customers more efficiently.
PDV added to the group’s data resources like print and production for direct mail campaigns, full data planning solution spanning the wider market and their team of data scientists for measurement and attribution. This enabled PDV to offer full end-to-end campaign management, which remains central to its strategy today.
Hitting the data compliance milestone
It was around this time that PDV hit another milestone: that of compliance as a first party data collector. In late 2018, the ICO conducted a review of the market and audited six leading data organisations, including PDV and DLG, to better understand how personal data is processed.
While the ICO compliance audit was, without doubt, a massive undertaking, it also strengthened PDV and DLG’s reputation as compliant and secure data collectors and providers. At the time – and before many in the data marketing industry were doing so – Nigel would talk about the importance of consumers whose data they held as stakeholders in the business, and the ICO audit provided confirmation of this: the data subjects who shared their data could be assured that their personal information would be handled correctly, securely and in line with data protection legislation.
From strength to strength
In 2019, PDV purchased online lead generation website MyOffers, the biggest name in the industry, which became another part of the offering to customers.
PDV is now one of five leading data-driven marketing companies alongside DLG, with its focus on telephone data acquisition; MyOffers – which does the same thing online; Transactis; and a new direct marketing data company, DM Data.
PDV’s mission today is clear: to help its clients acquire more customers more efficiently. As the UK’s leading customer acquisition agency, it works with brands – including People’s Postcode Lottery, Pure Cremation, Sky, Jet2 and Age UK – to help them recruit more long-term profitable customers by understanding what a good quality existing customer looks like and then finding more of them. PDV is channel and media agnostic and uses machine learning algorithms to create bespoke profiles that can be applied at the individual level. It then uses its deep understanding of consumers to create acquisition campaigns driven by their preferences, measuring success and refining campaigns.
Rather like Sarah Jessica Parker and her 12 outfit changes when she hosted the MTV Movie Awards in (you guessed it) 2000, PDV has also gone through a few outfit changes, but at our core, we were and still are focused on customer acquisition – and we believe we know more about the UK consumer, what motivates them and how they spend their time and money than any other company in the UK. We’ve been doing it for 25 years, and we’ll be here to do it for another 25 (or more). Craig David will probably still be in the charts too!
