Euro RSCG Discovery, a subsidiary of Havas, is a leading marketing and technology services organization, providing a comprehensive suite of marketing data services that offers its clients a more powerful competitive edge for their prospecting and CRM programs.
As part of its services, Euro RSCG Discovery creates and manages targeted direct marketing campaigns for its clients. To reach the appropriate groups and segments, the company relies on multiple purchased mailing lists along with existing customer information.
In the world of targeted marketing efforts, bad data has a direct impact on the effectiveness of the campaign and the bottom line. Each piece of mail that goes out to an incorrect or inappropriate address represents a missed opportunity and wasted expense. For this reason, householding and de-duplicating records were a top priority for Euro RSCG Discovery’s client base.
Euro RSCG Discovery previously used an in-house UNIX-based system to manage these marketing lists – a system that required extensive programming knowledge to operate. The company saw a need to open access to this capability to business users – those within the agency who knew what the data should look like. Because the company processed and integrated data from multiple sources, data standardization was a priority, but Euro RSCG Discovery needed a solution that would be flexible enough to enable quick and easy management of the data according to each client’s unique rules and requirements.
“We sought a solution that would complement an existing SAS BI implementation, as well as offer the flexibility that we needed,” says Rodney Mullins, director of technology for Euro RSCG Discovery. “While we considered DataFlux’s relationship with SAS during this search, it was really the flexibility and ease of use of the technology that ultimately convinced the company to purchase DataFlux.”
Euro RSCG Discovery chose DataFlux. The intuitive DataFlux user interface allows business users to quickly build sophisticated matching and de-duplication rules. With DataFlux technology, data from multiple, differing sources can easily be profiled, standardized and integrated into a single master record.
“Because we would be dealing with information from multiple data sources that would need to be assembled in different configurations for different clients, we needed a solution that would allow data routines to be built once and deployed in different ways,” says Paul Chandler, group account director for Euro RSCG Discovery. “DataFlux technology gave us the ability to store a library of data quality routines, which could be shared throughout the organization and deployed as needed in the configurations needed.”
DataFlux technology has significantly increased the efficiency of Euro RSCG Discovery’s householding and de-duplication efforts. Routines that previously had to be recoded by hand each week are now automated, easily adjusted and available on a daily basis.
The company also uses DataFlux technology to profile data sets from its customers prior to loading them into its data warehouse. This preemptive measure helps them maintain high data quality on an ongoing basis, and allows Euro RSCG Discovery to quickly identify any data anomalies from their customers’ source systems.
Euro RSCG Discovery has also found a significant amount of added value in DataFlux technology. The geocoding capabilities of DataFlux technology have allowed the agency to offer its clients more targeted campaigns, presenting them with the ability to drive mailings to deliver the right customers to targeted stores.
“The flexibility of DataFlux technology has been invaluable to us,” Mullins says. “We’ve seen a huge data quality reward for our clients.”