EPM is about:

Community

Networking

Consumer Research

Media & Marketing

EPM publishes newsletters, research studies and directories which focus on marketing, consumer and retail trends. The company also produces conferences and seminars; offers telephone-based short-term consulting as well as in-depth competitive analysis; and provides speakers for in-house presentations, workshops and conferences.

But EPM is more than just the sum of what it publishes and produces. Common to all is our recognition that networking is the key to success in our highly competitive marketing environment. Equally important is customer service—we're here to serve our members in all their needs for research and analysis.

We take the needs of our membership to heart. Members of the EPM community are assured of meeting the right people through: Contacts & Connections and detailed source information following every article in our newsletters. Through painstakingly maintained directories. And through personal introductions we'll make for you at our live events.

The EPM staff has a collective 100-plus years of expertise across key subject areas critical to the media, marketing and advertising communities: Entertainment Marketing, Licensing & Merchandising, Targeted Marketing and Consumer Trends.

Entertainment Marketing. Built around the company's first publication, Entertainment Marketing Letter (EML), this group of products and services provides the necessary tools for the rapidly growing relationship between entertainment companies and consumer brands.

Since 1988, EML has reported on the marketing and promotion techniques used by entertainment companies to market their properties, and by corporate America to leverage the "glamour" of entertainment in the sale of other goods and services.

In addition to the twice monthly EML, this group includes "The EPM Entertainment Marketing Soucrebook," an annual directory of more than 4000 key players in the entertainment, media, brand, retail and service sectors; The EPM Marketing Conference, essentially the "live edition" of the newsletter; and research studies including "On-Demand Advertising & Marketing," "Profiles of the U.S. Entertainment Consumer" and "Profiles of the U.S. Internet User."

Licensing & Merchandising. EPM's The Licensing Letter (TLL) is widely praised as "the bible of the business." Its data about the $108 billion worldwide market for licensed merchandise have been widely accepted as the industry standard since 1978. The newsletter also reports extensively on deals and dealmakers, retail trends, and general news.

TLL is the cornerstone for a wide array of publications and events covering the licensing business, including the introductory "Licensing Business Handbook," and in-depth reports for senior management on international licensing, royalty trends, benchmarking data and more.

"The Licensing Letter Sourcebook," is a 700+ page directory detailing the key players in every aspect of licensing, including property owners, their agents, and the manufacturers of thousands of products based on those properties.

TLL also hosts a variety of small group symposia on targeted topics of interest to the licensing community.

Targeted Marketing. The newsletters Youth Markets Alert, Marketing To Women, and Marketing To Emerging Majorities cover all the key sectors with a unique combination of original reporting on marketing initiatives (what mobile phone services are doing to attract kids, how auto manufacturers market to women, Blacks, Hispanics, etc.) and abstracts of research from private and public sources covering each market segment.

For greater depth, EPM regularly updates such research studies as "Marketing To Tweens & Teens" and annual compilations such as "All About Women Consumers." Published in early March each year, the latter aggregates relevant material about women, by area of interest, across all EPM publications.

Consumer Research. The core of EPM's insight into consumer trends is rooted in Research Alert, a twice-monthly newsletter that covers the latest research available on every conceivable aspect of consumer behavior. Media use, sexual habits, leisure activities, spending, and more.

While the newsletter reports on the latest research from private, public and university sources as it becomes available, the annual "Research Alert Yearbook" pulls together every research study we've reported in any of the newsletters and organizes it by subject, providing an instant yet in-depth overview of consumer interests and attitudes.

For subjects of greatest interest to members of the EPM community, the company publishes white papers, research studies and other publications. Examples include "Profiles of the U.S. Food Shopper," "Americans & Their Homes" and "What Moms Think & Do."

A Personal History of EPM

EPM was founded in 1988 by Ira Mayer and his wife and partner, Riva Bennett.

For 20 years prior to founding the company, Ira's night job was as a rock critic. By day, he wrote about the business of entertainment for newspapers, magazines and research organizations. Beginning in the 1980s, he established a prominent reputation as an entertainment industry and media analyst. Riva, who at the time sold research services for LINK Resources, a new media think tank, was selling some of the research Ira was writing.

After attending several sports and event marketing conferences, Ira and Riva realized no one was covering the entertainment industry purely from the marketing perspective, and that if he could write it and she could sell it well, that's what they should do!

Armed with a Rolodex of about 2000 fax numbers, Riva and Ira took two hour shifts starting at 7 p.m. on a Friday night, and throughout the weekend when the rates were low, they faxed a one-page letter describing a new newsletter they were launching — EPM Report (for Entertainment, Promotion & Marketing).

Monday morning they had three orders in the fax machine in their then-home office. They looked at each other and, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney (they wish), decided they better launch a newsletter!

While the company retained the EPM monicker, EPM Report morphed into Entertainment Marketing Letter, the better for people to know what the newsletter was about.

After a year publishing Entertainment Marketing Letter, one subscriber asked Ira to gather all those contacts and put them in alphabetical order, which he did. Realizing there were plenty of other great entertainment marketing contacts beyond those that could be reported, the fledgling company compiled the first "Entertainment Marketing Sourcebook" — an ambitious directory for a business that until then didn't know it was a community.

Another subscriber said, "It's great that you list all those contacts — but I need to MEET those people." And so the EPM Entertainment Marketing Conference was born. As the company expanded, and its reputation grew, EPM was approached about acquiring other publications, and added a number of them to its product catalog.

Slowly, Riva and Ira added staff in their Brooklyn home office until, with six people — one on the landing between the first and second floors — they realized they needed to move to a "real" office. (Besides, the kids were growing up and bringing friends home after school. "Shhhh!" they would say as they ascended the steps. "There are people working.")

Today, many of EPM's editors are experts in their fields and are often quoted in the general and business media on marketing practices and entertainment, consumer, and retail trends.

With an outstanding professional staff, the company continues to listen to EPM members as it develops new publications, conferences and other products and services.