Promotional Marketing Magazine announces a state-of-the-art online service, Promotional Marketing Digital Marketplace (PMDM) that will be the most advanced product search and business communication tool in the promotional products industry.

PMDM will feature many exclusive benefits to help distributors increase sales and enable suppliers to broaden their customer base.

As a service to the industry, PMDM will be made available free of charge to all qualified promotional products distributor salespeople. The 20,000 distributor salespeople who subscribe to Promotional Marketing Magazine, and the 11,000 business forms distributor salespeople who subscribe to Business Forms, Labels & Systems magazine, will all be pre-enrolled in PMDM, and will be able to activate their subscription by simply entering their password and company information on the site. Those distributors not in the magazine's database need only enroll online to also receive the free service. PMDM will open for business in 2003 with 50,000 supplier products from suppliers participating in Promotional Marketing's Catalog File, and qualified advertisers in the magazine. Products will include four-color digital images and 2003 pricing and product information. The PMDM database will fully reference 250,000 products within months, and continue to grow. Distributor salespeople will be able to search by product category, by theme, or by using the industry's first free word search capability in a product database.

The database will be organized based on ePSA compliant standards, enabling quicker, more consistent search results. Client presentations can be created at no charge, and distributor salespeople can e-mail questions to suppliers directly from PMDM.

PMDM will become supplier's most powerful marketing tool for expanding their list of active distributors. Suppliers will receive instant e-mail Requests For Quotes from the 31,000 distributor salespeople using PMDM. The Request For Quote Form also provides for direct links, utilizing the UPIC company identifier, to the Experian credit database, where suppliers have the option to check the distributor's credit history. Suppliers can also create direct links from a product in PMDM to the same product on their own website.

To further enhance pricing accuracy for distributor salespeople, suppliers can update their product information in PMDM from their desktop, and have the option of guaranteeing the accuracy of the pricing on each product.

"Gone are the days when distributors paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to access supplier product information that is frequently inaccurate or obsolete," said Michael Woody, President of International Marketing Advantages, an industry consultant overseeing the development of the database. "An update today will appear in PMDM tomorrow," he added. "Suppliers can now control the accuracy and timeliness of their own product data. I've had the opportunity to see this platform perform in another industry that Promotional Marketing's parent company serves, and their database technology far exceeds what is currently available in the promotional products industry."

"When I reviewed the new PMDM online product database business model, I was impressed with the company's commitment to incorporate the Universal Promotional Identification Code (UPIC) into the database as the principal industry identifier, as well as their intent to comply with all the ePSA standards for identifying products and product categories," commented Steve Slagle CAE, PPAI President. "Even more significant, however, is Promotional Marketing's plan to develop an industry product search tool that is FREE to all distributors. This model is contrary to the current offerings by other service providers, but is consistent with PPAI's belief that easy and affordable access to suppliers' product databases by all distributors can only help the industry grow. This product has the potential to revolutionize the business relationships between suppliers, distributors and the end buyers."