Progressive Enterprises and Affinity ID brought home both the gold award within the multichannel marketing category and the platinum award for general excellence at the NCDM 2010 Database Awards. Grocery chain Progressive uses data-driven rules, applied to its Onecard mySpecials program, to promote weekly specials via the Web and e-mail on an individual-customer basis. The program also delivers trend reports to executives which help assess the impact of marketing, competitor or environmental activity against key customer and store metrics.
The silver award in the multichannel marketing category went to Alcon and Relationship Marketing Inc. for a physician-targeting campaign designed to increase nasal spray sales. FedEx and Epsilon took the bronze for their Game Time campaign, which highlighted FexEx’s shipping offerings during the NFL season, and rewarded customers who met tailored shipping offerings use levels.
In the analytics and modeling applications category, gold honors went to SprintNextel for its efforts in isolating and maintaining the purity of a control group while simultaneously conducting a variety of marketing tests across its customer base. Sprint achieved this by assigning unique identifiers to all of its customers. Side benefits of the program include expedited customer list selection, creation of a more robust testing environment and simplified campaign measurement.
The analytics and modeling applications category generated two separate silver-award-worthy winners. Accent Marketing Service took one for a combination of predictive models, a claims model and a response model, all of which fed into a lead evaluation program for a home appliance manufacturer’s warranty offering. Campaign response rates for prospect lists run through this system rose by 1.05%, and customers brought in as a result of this analysis were 6% less likely to make claims against warranties. Within this group profit margins rose 3%.
Separately, International Business Machines earned a silver honor for its Analytic Automation initiative, which it is integrating into all client and prospect outreach programs. The program also features trend analysis, data quality initiatives and other data-based functions.
There was no bronze winner within the analytics and modeling applications category
While no entrant took a gold award within the business-to-business category, Aetna and Merkle partnered to earn silver for an initiative which offered healthcare to both business sole proprietors as well as early retirees. What made this effort noteworthy was Merkle’s ability to differentiate business from consumer targets.
The bronze honor in the business-to-business category went to Comcast Business Services and The Allant Group. Vendor and marketer worked together to synthesize disparate databases in preparation for a campaign to sell Comcast’s data, voice and video offerings. Comcast’s ability to have a clearer picture of corporate prospects led to better householding (in which targets under the same corporate umbrella are rolled up into a single view), more efficient list acquisition and processing techniques and – perhaps most important – increased effectiveness of Comcast’s direct mail customer acquisition activities.
The technological applications category generated only on metal-level winner, which was a silver-place showing by Rodale and Acxiom. The two organizations partnered on an automated system which tailors the nature and timing of promotional e-mails to Rodale’s customer base. The new system has allowed Rodale to trim campaign planning time from two to three weeks to a daily basis, and to increase the number of products it promotes from 23 every month to 151 every day.
The awards ceremony was hosted by Bob Garner, who kicked off the ceremony with a 20-minute display of mind-reading feats as well as one intentionally botched attempt to create a balloon animal.
