ORLANDO, FL – Although the exhibit hall at the National Center for Database Marketing conference here last week was packed with vendors hawking some of the hottest database marketing solutions, at least one attendee learned that he wouldn’t have to look any further than his own computer for what he needed.
Patrick Suess, marketing analyst with the PBS Learning Media division of the Public Broadcasting Service, Alexandria, VA, said he came to the show looking for a software solution that would help him generate some commonly used marketing reports quicker than he had been able to do before.
“I thought maybe I would find something that could reduce some of my tedium,” he said.
Some of the marketing lists Suess was being asked to produce were so large that he either could not retrieve them from his Oracle relational database or they simply took too long to generate. However, after speaking with some fellow attendees who have similar positions at other companies and attending one of the seminars, he learned that he could use the software he already had, Microsoft Access, to perform the functions he sought. By loading each day’s data individually, he would be able to reduce his processing time when he needed to generate the longer list reports.
“I had already started doing it that way anyway, but it was helpful to learn that other people were doing what I’m doing,” he said. “I thought maybe there was some type of software that I could patch on to what I have that would help me, but I learned that there really isn’t any.”
Suess said there were several software solutions being exhibited that had the functionality he was looking for, but most were designed for much larger enterprises than his own, which markets the catalog of PBS programs on video.
