It's 1:48 AM and I can't sleep.  80 Channels of nothing good is on TV.  My kids hid their Gameboy Advance from me, and I can't find the controller for the Nintendo so I guess I'll get a little work done.  Sound familiar?  So... your kids hide the Gameboy from you, too?

     Sitting by the cold glow of the CRT, I looked up "Mailing Lists" on the Google search engine and came up with more matches than Bayer has aspirin.  The top sponsored spot (they paid for that top slot with the little box around it) was for "Cheap Mailing Lists" from directmailconnection.com.  OK, I like cheap, as long as it isn't inferior.

     With one small click I challenged them to change my life and the way I think about researching mailing lists. Zoom, I was in. I looked up opportunity seekers from their data base of 4900 yellow pages and 500 white pages phone books they said they use.  No other sourcing was apparent.  I didn't know you could get opportunity seekers from the white pages, or there was even a "Opportunity Seekers" heading in the Yellow Pages.  Maybe in California - they seem to get everything first.

     Undaunted, I clicked further. The cost was $65/M - or you could buy 100 names for $15. I dunno... If you only have 15 bucks to throw at a direct mail test, better not quit your day job just yet.  On the upside, 10,000 names cost $450.  But it was their guarantee that scared me off: they'd send you 2 names for every one that came back.  I don't like cleaning someone else's mailing list at my cost of 34¢ for each wrecked and returned mailing piece I receive back.  So I left "cheap" in search of "better."  It was 2:00 AM, 12 minutes later.

     Back at Google, Listbazaar.com (infoUSA) also came up at the top of paid spots, they offered selections from a db of 12 million businesses, 250 million consumers, and also will sell me a CD Directory of phone books.  Bleary eyed, I wasn't quite ready for that yet.

     Undaunted by my resistance, they then tried to close me on a "Customer Analyzer" which carried a $250 price tag, then cost $250 for 500 names - which I passed on quite readily, thank you. Being anonymous really does have it's advantages, you know.  It was late and I was tired, not stupid.

     Continuing, I tried to look up motorcycle dealers and found no matches. After discarding the brief assumption there are no motorcycle dealers in the U.S., somehow I got to S.I.C. 5571-06 Motorcycle and Scooter Dealers-Honda.  Now I know: Info USA has a preference for Honda.

     I clicked my way towards a count of dealers in a 20 mile radius of my house in downtown Bala-Cynwyd PA (4 blocks outside of Philadelphia in case you've never heard of beautiful downtown Bala-Cynwyd - home of the famous...  uh... well, home to many people who are nice.)  I asked for a radius of 20 miles and found I could buy the full records of dealers for $10.80, or the base records of dealers for $6.  Exit, stage left, at 2:16, four minutes later.  I vowed I come back here one day, and I do for a more serious review of this site by the end of this research.

     After a brief stint at Google and a scan down the list of mailing lists URLs, I went to Accurateleads.com (Dimark) 800-865-4787.  Their site runs off of 40,000 databases, which sounded pretty extensive to me.  So I click on S.I.C. code information and a mini-screen pops up asking me to save the file in RTF format.  Thinking this means "Release Toxic Formula," I decline.  No sense clogging my 60 gig hard drive with this kind of stuff.  Heck, I'm almost at one gig now and I've only had this computer for less than two and a half years.

     I click on their "Tips" rollover and find it's under development.  I make a mental note to call them sometime between later and much later to offer them my direct marketing tips booklet (you can have one too - call 610-642-1000 and request it) for their content.  Apparently at this late hour my mind is under development, too, as I completely forget about it until proofing this article.

     They offer about 50 specialty lists, and offer counts - but not in real time (they'll call me tomorrow with the count) so with a click and a whoosh, I head out at 2:23, just 7 minutes later.

     Back at Google I fumble through several more sites unproductively - PAML.net which is email only; Apple, another email only list, then land on #11, USADATA which is Acxiom - a pretty familiar name to us DM techies.

     Feeling comfortably numb in my robe and skivvies before the CRT screen, I go in.  Click: Select by state, click: advanced list data, click: 10 to 19 employees and bingo - PA businesses with 10-19 people = a list with 37,233 records which I can buy at 20¢ a name or $7,446.60.  Not having my credit card handy I bludgeon on, completely reading their 20 page agreement.  Oh, sorry, I must have dozed off.  Since my eyes can't focus all that well late at night I make a mental note to completely read their 20 page agreement sometimes between later and never and I skim through their 20 page agreement in about 10 seconds, not being able to focus on a single word, and leave it for others with more time on their hands to read. I then proceed directly to step 4 which is pay and get list.

     Somehow I feel cheated.  Like taking your sister to the prom, I felt I should have at least run across a "thank you" by this time - especially if I was going to plunk down $7,446.60 after being at their site for under 20 minutes.  So I looked for the "back" button and... there was no going back.  No back button.  I guess they figured if I got this far the pressure was on to sign.

     Not yet ready to commit to a $7,000 sale, I navigated my way to earlier screens and found pop-up mini-screens kept appearing out of nowhere almost as fast as I could click on their close boxes.  It was OK, really - I was feeling a bit of a dominatrix by not really waiting for their content to show up. MMmmmm... More power. Clicking around some more I found I kept returning to the same screens until they finally tried to sell me consulting reports from $1,600 to $7,500 a pop, so I leave at 2:29, 16 minutes after entering their site.

     I always knew the web was the home of the short attention span theater - and here I was, living proof.

     Back at Google things were heating up at a the URL of a site of a lesbian mailing list, but without photos I left immediately.  Then I wondered if I was going to get emails from all the porn sites like when, umm, my friend, umm, did when he visited a few porn sites.  OK, so he visited a few hundred porn sites.  Heck, that's who's making all the money on the web.  Don't tell my you've never.......  Even once?  Just out of curiosity?  Yea, right.

     So returning to Google I clicked on the site of Gimp.org just to find out what the heck gimp.org was.  To my amazement, it was a full blown-out site complete with documentation about, well - I never did figure it out as it was all computer stuff.  I guess geek.org was taken.  Go on - check it out, see if you can figure out what the heck it is.

     At the 40th slot at the search engine was ZAPDATA (from IMARKET and D&B).  If you haven't heard of ZAPDATA by now, and their offer for 50 free leads - touted in their many mailings and full page advertisements in all the trade rags - where have you been living?  So now I figure I must be getting close to the good stuff.  I'd go right in an get 50 free leads.

     But noooooo.  They wanted me to register first.  And from the looks of the form I was to sign over my life for 50 stinkin' leads.  Sure, they post their privacy policy - if you read it you'll be the first.  Even people in Alaska with 180 days of 24 hour nights per year, who are retired, with no cable TV, and have nothing to do but watch the ice recede - don't read this document. Me neither. I left.

     Google turned up a spiritual mailing list, but with no photos of God I left from there immediately, too; and a mental health page mailing list which fearing the worst - they'd capture my name and invite me in - I didn't visit.

     Then I got smart, and typed "Direct+Marketing+Mailing+Lists into the search parameters on Google and bam - 4,674,237 pages of catalogs came up.  Ooops.

     Finally, the thinkdirectmarketing not-quite-ready-for-prime-time site came up.  I clicked on "articles" thinking I could finally learn something and one article came up.  Someone please tell them the "s" after the word makes it plural. The "Books" link took me to Amazon... and I never did find a list and left 12 screens and 6 minutes later.

It was getting late - or early - depending on your view of time, and if you have to get up in 4 hours. So I scroll down to dmoz.org/business/marketing/direct_marketing which shows about 100 mailing list links, with one line descriptions of each.  Some were familiar names, but some of the biggies were absent - like Info USA (wow how could they miss that one!) and Edith Roman, the firm that sent me the nicest list catalog I've ever received.  Hmmmm... Edith Roman...

     Knowing the information is out there I typed in EdithRoman.com. and finally found familiar turf.  I had enough clearance from previous client work to fully access counts and databases, so I kinda knew how to get most of the information I needed, but still - like taking your sister to the prom - the experience left me with a "not quite fully fulfilled" feeling.

     While I could get S.I.C. counts and a few demographics with the provided click boxes, I couldn't get multiple overlays that weren't included in their checkbox page.  Additional information, and the tough, lean questions about files that I like to ask list vendors was lacking.  File usage, not there.  Number of file continuations or rollouts, nope.  Recency, frequency, monetary, no.  Data Card information - yes, for some files.  Missing: relationships that you build with list vendors and recommendations you can trust - definitely lacking.  All in all, the web doesn't do everything - but for basic preliminary list investigations at 2AM, it's great. Must... sleep... now....