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Formation of Abacus Australia
Abacus, a division of DoubleClick Inc., a data and research provider to the direct marketing industry, has announced the formation of Abacus Australia, to be based in Sydney with an office in Melbourne.
The Australian company will offer two products: Retention Modeling, which offers marketers increased profits from their own house file list, and Acquisition Modeling which enables them to find qualified prospects beyond it.
Abacus operates through a system of 'Alliances' in the US, UK, Japan and Germany. Each Alliance manages a co-operative database of members' transactional information, which can be used to improve direct mail targeting and customer segmentation based on recent actual purchase activity across the database.
Brian Rainey, President of Abacus, sees this as a natural expansion, as many existing US and UK customers are also in Australia. 'With over 10 companies already committed to joining the Australian Alliance, more than half of which are active participants with Abacus elsewhere in the world, we have a strong foundation from which the local operation can quickly ramp-up'. Abacus has 350 participants in the UK and 1,800 in the US.
According to a 2003 survey conducted by the Australian Catalogue Association (ACA), the number of [direct mail] catalogues distributed by retailers and other marketers has increased by an average of 6.2% per annum since 1999, and is forecast to grow by 5% to A$1.75 billion during 2004. In the same time, the number of Australian consumers visiting a retail outlet as a result of reading a catalogue is up from 50 per cent in 1999 to 74 per cent in the 2003 survey.
The parent company's web site is at www.doubleclick.com
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