Valpak Direct Marketing Systems, LLC, commonly known as Valpak, is a North American

direct marketing Direct marketing is a form of communicating an offer, where organizations communicate directly to a pre-selected customer and supply a method for a direct response. Among practitioners, it is also known as ''direct response marketing''. B ...

company owned by

Platinum Equity Platinum Equity, LLC is an American private equity investment firm founded by Tom Gores in 1995. The firm focuses on leveraged buyout investments of established companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. History Platinum Equity was founded in 199 ...

. Valpak provides print, mobile and

online advertising Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...

customer data Customer data or consumer data refers to all personal, Behaviorism, behavioural, and demographic data that is collected by marketing companies and departments from their customer base. To some extent, data collection from customers intrudes into c ...

and

coupons In marketing, a coupon is a ticket or document that can be redeemed for a financial discount or rebate when purchasing a product. Customarily, coupons are issued by manufacturers of consumer packaged goods or by retailers, to be used in r ...

. Valpak distributes its Blue Envelope to 41 million demographically targeted households each month and millions more consumers through its

advertising postcard An advertising postcard is a postcard used for advertising purposes (as opposed to a tourism or greeting postcard). Postcards are used in advertising as an alternative to or to complement other print advertising such as catalogs, letters, and fly ...

s and

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

every year.

History

Terry Loebel, an unemployed autoworker, founded Valpak in 1968, using a $500 loan to start mailing coupons from his home to households in

Clearwater, Florida Clearwater is a city located in Pinellas County, Florida, United States, northwest of Tampa and St. Petersburg. To the west of Clearwater lies the Gulf of Mexico and to the southeast lies Tampa Bay. As of the 2020 census, the city had a populat ...

. In 1972, Valpak established its first franchise in

Orlando, Florida Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County, Florida, Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Greater Orlando, Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, acco ...

. A group of investors purchased Valpak from Terry Loebel in 1985. In September 1991, Cox Target Media, Inc. purchased Valpak and by 1997, Valpak was mailing out 11 billion coupons a year. In 2005, Valpak opened a

St. Petersburg, Florida St. Petersburg is a city in Pinellas County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 258,308, making it the fifth-most populous city in Florida and the second-largest city in the Tampa Bay Area, after Tampa. It is the ...

headquarters with 50,000-square-foot space and had 310 employees. In January 2017,

acquired Valpak from Cox Target Media, Inc.

Products

Coupon envelopes

Valpak prints, packages and ships coupon envelopes from the Valpak Manufacturing Center, a $200-million, 500,000-square-foot print production facility in St. Petersburg. Print inserts in the envelope advertise local businesses and national brands with coupons for dining, health and beauty, entertainment, automotive, home services and more. In each of its mailing cycles, Valpak sells the outside of its envelope to select national advertisers for promotions, marketing campaigns and

sweepstakes A sweepstake is a type of contest where a prize or prizes may be awarded to a winner or winners. Sweepstakes began as a form of lottery that were tied to products sold. In response, the FCC and FTC refined U.S. broadcasting laws (creating the ...

. Advertisers include

Tennis Channel Tennis Channel is an American sports-oriented digital cable and satellite television network owned by the Sinclair Television Group subsidiary of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. It is devoted to events and other programming related to the game of ...

HGTV HGTV (an initialism for Home & Garden Television) is an American pay television channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The network primarily broadcasts reality programming related to home improvement and real estate. As of February 2015, appr ...

Legoland Legoland (, trademark in uppercase as LEGOLAND) is a chain of family theme parks focusing on the construction toy system Lego. They are not fully owned by The Lego Group itself; rather, they are owned and operated by the British theme park com ...

Shutterfly Shutterfly, LLC. is an American photography, photography products, and image sharing company, headquartered in Redwood City, California. The company is mainly known for custom photo printing services, including books featuring user-provided ima ...

and

Panera Bread Panera Bread is an American chain store of bakery-café fast casual restaurants with over 2,000 locations, all of which are in the United States and Canada. Its headquarters are in Sunset Hills, Missouri. The company operates as Saint Louis ...

Advertising postcards

In October 2019, Valpak partnered with the

United States Postal Service The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the U ...

on a 2-year test of Plus One

postcard A postcard or post card is a piece of thick paper or thin cardboard, typically rectangular, intended for writing and mailing without an envelope. Non-rectangular shapes may also be used but are rare. There are novelty exceptions, such as wood ...

s. These postcards became a permanent USPS product in January 2022. Valpak also provides an automated postcard service to audiences like new movers as well as other targeted and saturation postcard products.

Customer data

Valpak's data and analytics platform incorporates thousands of data points across billions of records (aggregated public, survey, behavioral, transactional and proprietary data) for brands to identify and advertise to specific audience segments. Marketers can also use its self-service mailing list platform to create their own mailing lists prioritized by rankings, deliverability and postal rates.

References

{{reflist Marketing companies of the United States Marketing companies established in 1968 Promotion and marketing communications 1968 establishments in Florida Companies based in Clearwater, Florida