by Antony Begley.

The database marketing industry has a habit of throwing up unlikely partnerships, but as dynamic duos go, the partnership behind marketing data company The Ark couldn’t be more dissimilar. Founder and owner Simon McLaven is polished, assertive, outgoing and loquacious as he tucks into his moules marinières in a little French bistro just a few yards off Edinburgh’s Princes St. Meanwhile his counterpart, Managing Director Martin Jaggard, is quieter, more reflective and very considered in his delivery. It’s not too difficult to have a guess at their respective roles at one of the fastest growing businesses in the sector, to work out who is the front man and who is the data and operations expert.

Jaggard, of course, will be known to many in the database marketing industry from his 21 year stint at what is now known as dbg. McLaven may be less of a household name, but it’s probably safe to assume that’s all about to change thanks to the full scale rollout of the company’s new National Deceased Register (NDR).

It’s not every day that new suppression files are launched into the UK market, so the buzz of interest around the NDR has reached fever pitch of late.

Drawn to data

To understand how McLaven and Jaggard came to dream up the idea of the NDR, it’s useful to take a whistle-stop tour of their respective pasts. Having left school at 17 to work for himself, McLaven was always the headstrong, confident and ambitious type. After working for a few agencies in London, he quickly built himself a reputation and spent the next decade enhancing it – aided no doubt by the fact that this was back in the glory days of the agencies when marketing budgets were at levels that seems farcical by today’s recession-battered standards.

Over the course of the next couple of decades he carved out a hugely successful career that reached a zenith in 2003 when he oversaw the sale of Emery McLaven Orr (EMO), the automotive dealer marketing agency he was a partner with.

At the time, EMO was one of the largest regional groups of agencies in UK and the sale to Creston Plc left McLaven a lot more comfortable financially but at a crossroads in his life. What next? Take it or easy and enjoy the spoils, or find a new challenge?

While he admits to considering a break, he says that it “just wouldn’t have worked” for him. Even in the hour or two it takes to eat our lunch and finish the interview it becomes abundantly clear that he’s not the type of man who’d be happy to be busy doing nothing.

One more hurrah

So the die was cast. Ever the entrepreneur, the ink was hardly dry on the EMO deal when McLaven decided that he had “one good one” left in him.

After a bit research and on a hunch, he decided to try his luck in the burgeoning world of direct marketing.

“I had this idea that I could drive higher volumes of marketing response through key trigger-based events,” he explains. “It’s commonplace now, but back then it was a novel idea. I reckoned we could gather data for sale around those important times in your life that are characterised by upheaval and change. Things like – home movers, kids going to university, people retiring, new mums, that sort of thing.”

The Ark would then source data around these events and sell it onto marketers and agencies. The idea turned out to be a profitable one and as time rolled by, the range of trigger-based events that The Ark was supplying data for got wider and wider.

“We hadn’t actually set out to be that sort of company because I was still keen to do some the sexy agency stuff I’d spent my life doing but it just didn’t work out that way,” explains McLaven. “We ended up providing all this data to these huge brand agencies and got none of the creative stuff so eventually data just became the bigger part of the business.”

That was back in late 2006. Enter Martin Jaggard who’d spent over 20 years in data, mostly with the firm that ultimately ended up as dbg, now run by South African data star Richard Lees.

A modest and softly spoken man, Jaggard has long been highly regarded by his peers and is widely acknowledged to have one of the sharpest data minds in the industry.

“Everything I gleaned out of this business, I’ve gotten through Martin,” says McLaven, matter of factly.

Jaggard started out as a computer operator on mainframes before getting into programming for the best part of a decade. After that he moved into account management and spent eight or nine years dealing with clients before hitting 40 and deciding that it was time for a change.

McLaven and Jaggard had met more or less accidentally a couple of times but when the offer of a new role was made, Jaggard didn’t take too much persuading to consider a new direction.

And it was straight in at the deep end, as Jaggard recalls: “It was clear that I had to hit the ground running at The Ark – Simon’s that sort of guy – but I brought an idea with me at the time about suppressions. Back then I was looking at goneaways and how we could use more of that data for marketing purposes. It had occurred to me that if someone’s moved in, that also means someone’s moved out – and at the time the industry wasn’t targeting that opportunity.”

Five or six years later and there are still companies launching solutions aimed squarely at this consumer segment, vindicating Jaggard’s concept.

With plenty to keep them busy, the business worked hard at establishing itself in the industry, a challenge that proved more difficult than McLaven would have liked, judging from his take on it.

“Our business for a few years was providing data for appending purposes – but in this industry it seems that you need to do your apprenticeship before you’re taken seriously, and that took a little while,” he says. “But we’re over that hurdle now and because we’ve been working primarily for large end user organisations, we’ve come to realise that it doesn’t matter what the data owner thinks – it’s what the client thinks that matters.”

And with that in mind, and for reasons that were not made entirely clear in the interview, McLaven and Jaggard somehow came up with the idea of a new deceased file.

The reluctance of the pair to discuss the genesis of the idea is probably related to the reluctance they have in disclosing how they are actually identifying the data that makes up the new National Deceased Register. This secrecy is rooted in the the fact that the pair don’t want to reveal too much, “otherwise everyone would be doing it and we would lose our competitive advantage”. An understandable position. However The Ark will legally warrant that the data is compiled and provided in an absolutely compliant manner.

One thing that is not up for debate is the fact that the file works. The pair have managed to persuade just about all of the UK’s leading bureaux and agencies to give the file a try – and the results have been universally positive, as far as I can make out. My off the record conversations with a number of these bureaux have also confirmed that the file definitely works.

“We simply have access to a large business network. It’s from within this network we receive notifications of death. We then verify those notifications and only once they are satisfied that the person is definitely dead do they release the data to us.”

Jaggard asserts that the contributors have “nothing to do with data as we know it” and hints that the clients include “public and private organisations across a broad spectrum – the sorts of companies you’d notify if someone died.”

The Ark then uses that data as a starting point and runs the file against all of the publicly available official deceased data, then against files “they would have been removed from”. ááá

ááá Or, as Jaggard puts it: “Like any file we don’t claim it is 100% error free but we double check and we are as sure as we possibly can be that every single name on the file is deceased.”

At this point, McLaven interjects somewhat forcefully to bring his own take on the issue: “Listen, a deceased file should be a deceased file. Someone is either dead or they’re not, it’s black and white – there are no gray areas. There around 50,000 deaths a month in the UK and when you are asking clients to suppress a record they just want a suppression file they rely on”.

To illustrate he point, he cites the case of a major mail order company who run a database of around six million active customers at any point in time.

He says: “After a cleanse on their base, 50,000 customers were flagged as being supposedly dead however these customers were still transacting and buying goods. So unless there’s internet access in heaven, it’s hard to see how that could possibly be – and 50,000 is a significant number of potential customers to rule out wrongly.”

The Ark states that 30% of the records on the NDR file are unique and do not appear on any other deceased database, a figure now backed up by many of the leading bureaux and a number of end user clients, and McLaven is quick to highlight the fact that “there is no assumed data on the file, not a single contact – it’s all transactional, verified data”.

Assumed and self-nominated data is evidently a particular bugbear of McLaven’s, which becomes increasingly interesting in light of the fact that the next step for The Ark is to launch goneaways file.

“We’re having to be very careful in the claims we make and we have to go through a rigorous process of having to back up everything we say but we accept that because that’s what everybody should be doing all of the time in the data industry,” he says.

“Goneaways are just the same. Who can afford to suppress their database when a large percentage might be assumed goneaway? A million or two customers that haven’t gone anywhere at all? Nobody can afford to do that.”

Jaggard’s more reserved take on this issue bears scrutiny: “I think some in the data industry have become greedy and they’ve got it wrong again when it comes to suppressions. In whose interest is it to have a bigger suppression file? The data owners of course, because they’ll achieve more matches and in turn make more money. What we should all be focusing on is quality, not quantity. Accuracy not avarice. The only person that matters in this is the client. And all they want is accuracy.”

The future of the deceased file

But that debate is for another day. The big news now is the NDR and what lies ahead for it.

“The NDR has been tested extensively by all sorts of bureaux and end users and it’s quickly becoming established. Data is going out every month and the results we’re getting are definitive. The file works.”

The jury may still be out on that, but with every passing month the verdict looks increasingly likely to fall in favour of this most unlikely of partnerships.

“If you’d said to me six years ago that I’d be so heavily involved in data I would have laughed,” says McLaven. “If my friends could see me now! But we’re on the right track and all we’re trying to achieve is to do the basics better, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel.”

Of course it hasn’t all been plain sailing, and the pair are very open about their ‘log moment’. To this day they still have a railway sleeper that sits in the office with two tea cups on it to commemorate the day when the pair sat facing each other on a log wondering whether it was time to call it a day.

Half way through the chat, the office manager brought them both a cup of tea and, suitably refreshed, they decided to knuckle down and dig even deeper. But that’s ancient history now and the company has successful marketing data, lead generation and bureau services divisions.

“That day we decided to just focus on being a bloody good data company, and I’m pleased to say that I think we’ve come good on our promise,” concludes McLaven.

 “So here we are ….. a bloody good data company”.

National Deceased Register: the lowdown

What is it?

According to The Ark, “the NDR is the most comprehensive, accurate and reliable deceased suppression file in the UK”. A bold claim.

Tell us more…

The NDR has taken over three years to create and The Ark states that over 30% of the records on the file are unique and do not appear on any other deceased suppression database.

How has it been created?

Well, this is the interesting bit as the Ark will only confirm that deceased records are identified through a network of unnamed partner businesses. These contributing partners cover a wide range of organisations from both the private and public sectors.

Each record identified is then matched to official records of death and no record is included on the file unless the team at The Ark are confident it is a genuine deceased. Additionally, none of the records entered onto the NDR are volunteered and there is no element of entry onto the file that is driven by self selection or nomination.

And how is the deceased data verified?

Initial verification of the record identified is carried out by matching to what The Ark call “official sources”. Subsequent checks help to confirm that the records have been removed from other trusted and validated sources to ensure that no record is included on the NDR without official verification.

What size are we talking?

Approximately 35,000 new records are identified each month – around 69% of the total number of deaths in the UK each month. Additionally, The Ark has records dating back to the year 2000, providing 3.9 million verified deceased records to date.

And what is contained within the file?

Title, First Name, Middle Initial, Surname, Address Lines, Postcode

Is the file sustainable for the future?

The process has now been in place for over a year and has proven a consistent level of newly identified records per month.

Six million dollar question: is the industry buying it?

Yes, quite literally. Despite the fact that the precise source has not been divulged, the NDR has been tested by all of the leading bureaux plus a large number of end user clients. According to The Ark, they have all reached the same conclusion “it does exactly what we say it does”.