List Rentals: What’s Negotiable? What’s Not?

• Net names. An interesting twist is taking place in this area. Huntoon explains: “Say a mailer has an 85 percent net-name arrangement. But due to nixies, DMA Suppression and other necessary deductions, they net out fewer names, say, only 82 percent. Someone’s losing out on that 3 percent.”

According to Huntoon, the major list houses are trying to devise a way to address this through a locked-in rate, whereby all deductions are negotiated before the names are shipped, and no further deductions are allowed after shipping (unless some unusual error occurs in the running of the order). If this becomes standard practice, she says, it will cause a lot more upfront negotiations but eliminate the back-end rebilling process.