Just a bit of an interesting PR I got today:

Vodafone Australia Chooses SAS to Optimize Marketing Campaigns
LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SAS, the leader in business analytics, will provide Vodafone Australia with SAS Marketing Optimization software to enhance marketing campaigns through advanced analytics and optimization techniques.

Vodafone regularly targets more than a million customers with direct mail campaigns. But the increasingly inadequate contact strategy led the company to seek an advanced campaign optimization solution.

Head of Analytics and Campaign Intelligence for Vodafone Australia, Cahyadi Poernomo, explained, “We decided to switch to an intelligent solution because of how long it took to manually process information we needed. As the number of campaigns grew and became more integrated, our capabilities became impracticable.”

“By implementing SAS, we estimated that we could significantly improve our return for marketing campaigns, whilst increasing customer satisfaction by eliminating uncoordinated or conflicting marketing communications. Vodafone will be the first telecom in Australia to take full advantage of such tools.”

SAS Australia and New Zealand managing director Gordon Clubb, said, “We are delighted that the local arm of the world’s biggest mobile telephone company chose SAS. In telecommunications, where fierce competition and threatened margins constantly challenge, there is no longer room for marketing campaigns lacking the single version of the truth that only state-of-the-art customer intelligence can deliver."

Vodafone spends millions of dollars on direct marketing campaigns. Poernomo says the company is looking to reduce this outlay up to 30 percent while still enjoying similar or better levels of return. Poernomo explained, “SAS fits all our selection criteria. The tool had good capabilities and fit our current structure and systems. SAS also provides comprehensive 24-by-7 support, which is fantastic. One of the main benefits that SAS provided was its peoples’ knowledge and experience. It was very advantageous for us to have on board experts in implementing similar solutions worldwide.”

SAS is used throughout the Vodafone group for modeling and predictive analytics from applications such as customer relationship management through to the resource management of their IT services in many countries including Australia, Italy, New Zealand and India.

SAS Marketing Optimization collects and analyzes statistics to calculate precisely which elements of the marketing campaigns succeed. Up-to-the minute information reveals which channels are most effective in a given situation, which customers to target, and overall campaign effectiveness. The analyses are used to refine and optimize future campaign design and execution for improved return.

Today’s announcement came at The Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas, a business conference presented by SAS that brings together more than 500 attendees from the public and private sectors to share ideas on critical business issues.