Publishing Interests

The Orlando Sentinel Creates Successful Direct Mail Campaigns with DI-Diver

The Orlando Sentinel runs DI Solution on an IBM AIX Unix server, and users access data Models from Windows NT clients. Barbara Lougheed, Database Analyst, explains how the Orlando Sentinel uses the Dimensional Insight solution in Sentinel Direct, their direct marketing department.

Lougheed receives requests from Sales Reps for names of people to target for specific promotions. Different accounts require a different audience. The mailing list criteria for a fast food chain, for example, is different from that for a fitness club.

"We have data that includes age, income range, gender, unit type (such as apartment or house), children present, length of residence, head of household, MicroVision segment (a demographic code), county, newspaper subscription status, carrier route, individual ID, and household ID for our 9 county area in Florida," says Lougheed. "First, the client will provide an address(es), and then request a count of households for a certain age and income range and radius around their locations. The household count might come back as 40,000. But if the client's print budget is in the 20,000 range, I can bring the radius down, raise the income level, or reduce the age range, right from my desktop, depending on what the client and Sales Rep request. Once we have produced a list within the client's budget and within the criteria that meet the promotion, I export the file and that's it. The mailing list is ready."

"DI-Diver makes this process much quicker because I can save common dives that are automatically updated with new information each time I access them. A typical dive sequence would be, for example, to dive on the number of people between the ages of 18-24 within a group of three counties. Of that group, how many are apartment dwellers? And exactly how far are they from a fitness chain's locations? Once I enter the latitude and longitude of the fitness chain's 16 different locations, DI-Diver's "miles" function calculates the distance from each household to each of the locations. So now I can limit the list to households within a specified distance from the client's locations. I can save this dive (with the latitude and longitude calculations) and each time I access the data, it is updated with the most recent information. Sometimes I manipulate the list further to increase or reduce the number of people. The quickness and flexibility that DI-Diver offers makes it easy to create the right list."

"DI-Diver also eliminates the possibility of duplicate records. If two fast food locations are eight miles from each other, and the query is for a five-mile radius around all locations, duplicate records from the overlaps would have been produced in the past. DI-Diver's grouping feature allows for only one name per household within certain criteria to appear, and that saves us a lot of time, and the customer saves a lot of money."

When asked about return on investment, Lougheed replied, "Our clients are satisfied with the results of these mailings, and they keep coming back. I can now fulfill Sales Reps' requests within a few hours, as opposed to a few days. The quickness and flexibility of the Dimensional Insight solution is very valuable to us. In the past, I would create household points in a mapping program using the longitude and latitude of each record. Then I would have to plot all the client's sites, put those on the map, select all household points within a specified radius around each site, and export to Access to do further querying and grouping. Exporting these points took a very long time because it had to chug through so many records. And if the client came back and requested a larger radius, I would have to start all over to select a larger circle of points from the map."

In the future, the Orlando Sentinel plans to expand the use of DI-Diver to advertising sales analysis, linage/classified management, and circulation analysis.