DataLab USA Announced as 1st Place Winner for the Direct Marketing Associations 2007 Analytical Challenge
Germantown, MD October 24, 2007

DataLab USA (www.datalabusa.com), one of the nation's foremost analytics and database marketing agencies, announced that it has won first place in the DMA Analytics Challenge held Monday at DMA07, the Direct Marketing Association's Annual Conference and Exhibition last week in Chicago.

The DMAAnalytics Challenge invited organizations on the DMA's Analytics Council to build a response model based on the same dataset and raw variables.

Contestants were instructed to transform, combine, and analyze the data to score and select the best 25% of the population to maximize profit of a marketing campaign. The DMAAnalytics Council and CAC Group, Inc. sponsored the contest.

Out of an initial field of 55 contestants, 26 companies submitted their best predictive model for the competition. The top three finalists were invited to present their models at DMA07. This year the difference between first and second place was the biggest ever with an incremental 5% lift. Second and third place had a difference of less then 0.5%. When in 2006 first, second, and third place had less then a 0.5% difference between all three of their predictive models.

DataLab created multiple sub models based on homogeneous population to target response and likelihood of default. The team then combined these sets of models using an expert-of-expert approach to capture the best insight from each model.