DMA08 Conference

The first session of the DMA08 Conference that I viewed was about using variable video to create an engaging dialogue with your customer. Randy Spurrier, CEO, of Nimblefish Technologies spoke about gathering customer data and running it through automated marketing engines. These marketing engines, that his company builds, use customer preferences and CRM data to create customized, relevant, video responses in effort to raise customer response rates. Analysis of the results showed that relevant video messaging can significantly increases customer response rates.

The second session of the DMA08 conference that I viewed was about using social computing to drive ecommerce sales and loyalty. Again the main point that the speaker was tyring to get across was making sure that whatever marketing strategy your company is using the more relevant it is to your customer the better off you will be. The speaker emphasized the importance of using customer ratings and reviews on ecommerce sites as a means to increase relevancy which in turn would help increase sales and loyalty. Without giving it much thought when ever I buy products online I base a lot of my decision on customer reviews, and never really saw the power of customer reviews as a direct marketing tool until I listened to this session.

The last session of the DMA08 that I looked at was about the keys to predictive modeling. The speakers talked about the kinds of software that is out there to help companies build predictive models, and the different kids of models that can be built. Matt Kramer, Consulting leader for Acxiom corporation stated the one most important components of a good model is good data because otherwise the model is not going to be accurate. He also stated that the most common modeling techniques used by direct marketers are logistic and linear regression. Overall, I found listing to these sessions from the DMA08 conference quite interesting, and as a recommendation for next semester I would suggest having students include some of the sessions from the DMA conferences in their blogs. I think that it adds another dynamic to the class that is very insightful and relevant.