AEGON Direct Marketing Services, Inc. selects SAS® as its marketing and BI platform; In Multi-Year Deal, SAS® Customer Intelligence Suite to Displace Existing Marketing Systems

Business Wire, Oct 26, 2005

LAS VEGAS -- For any company engaged in marketing, it's important to understand customers and tailor the right products or services that appropriately fit their needs. For a company whose entire business is providing direct marketing services, accessing accurate and timely customer intelligence - and then targeting its marketing efforts with precision - can make the difference between success and extinction.

As its name suggests, AEGON Direct Marketing Services, Inc., (ADMS) - one of the largest direct marketers of life and supplemental health insurance products in the world - is such a marketing-focused company. And today, SAS, the leader in business intelligence, announced that ADMS has selected SAS and its SAS(R) Customer Intelligence software suite as the company's marketing and business intelligence platform, displacing a number of systems.

In a multi-year deal, ADMS will implement SAS software solutions ranging from SAS Marketing Automation and SAS Activity-Based Management to SAS Interaction Management and SAS Enterprise BI Server. ADMS already relies on SAS Marketing Optimization software to fine-tune its broad and varied marketing campaigns.

Together, the SAS solutions will provide ADMS with crucial customer intelligence, while helping the company consolidate its many varied marketing systems into a single, integrated suite of software products. This integration will help ADMS align and improve operations among its four U.S. locations, so it can deliver a single, consistent view of each customer and prospect for all campaigns. With the SAS solutions, ADMS expects to improve customer targeting, enhance up-sell and cross-sell opportunities (including the ability to predict the next best offer to give customers - trigger marketing), and ultimately, boost to the effectiveness and bottom-line impact of all marketing efforts at ADMS.

"We had specific needs to improve our efficiencies - improved analytics, accelerated time for the intelligence to reach the user, and a consolidation of systems and customer and prospect information across our different offices," said Karen Klein, ADMS' senior vice president of marketing services. "We chose SAS as our business partner because we were confident in the power of the SAS marketing software suite, which fully complements our previous positive experiences with the SAS Marketing Optimization technology and SAS' consultative added value."

Last year, ADMS purchased SAS Marketing Optimization to improve its marketing campaign performance and optimize the appropriate mix of offers with those prospects most likely to respond. After helping ADMS analyze the entire population of prospects and offers, SAS Marketing Optimization then supplies the scenario most likely to provide the highest ROI for the campaign portfolio. After only a one-month implementation, ADMS was able to automate key marketing processes, which shortened cycle times, reduced manual effort and improved ROI.

"SAS is the clear choice to bring together our operational and analytics environment on a platform that will allow our marketing efforts at AEGON Direct Marketing Services, Inc., to be more efficient and more informed," said Mark Rude, CIO of ADMS. "SAS is the only vendor with an end-to-end solution that addresses our business and technical requirements."

"Only SAS provides marketing automation, marketing optimization and business intelligence on a unified and highly extensible enterprise-class platform: the SAS(R)9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform," said Jim Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS. "SAS has long been recognized for its leadership in customer intelligence, but it is especially satisfying when a leading marketing company such as AEGON Direct Marketing Services, Inc. selects SAS as its business partner and our customer intelligence technology suite as its marketing and business intelligence platform."

Today's announcement was made at the BetterManagement LIVE Worldwide Business Conference (http://www.BetterManagement.com/LIVE), which addresses critical business management issues from around the world. BetterManagement LIVE brings together more than 1,000 attendees from the public and private sectors to share insights and knowledge. More than 85 speakers in seven focused tracks represent a broad spectrum of executives, academics, consultants and financial experts.

About SAS(R) Marketing Automation

SAS Marketing Automation (http://www.sas.com/solutions/crm/mktauto/) applies the world's foremost market response modeling solution to the challenge of developing and delivering marketing messages to consumers. Only SAS Marketing Automation provides a complete view of customers through robust data management, a deep understanding and optimized segmentation of customers through rich analytics, increased efficiency through the use of repeatable, automated processes in campaign design and execution, and closed loop reporting and analysis to measure the effectiveness of campaigns.

About SAS(R) Marketing Optimization