ORLANDO–TransUnion will take a new direction in 2006, focusing on its marketing services capabilities as a result of its 2004 acquisition of Douglas-Danielle Inc., an executive said at yesterday’s National Center for Database Marketing conference.
Founded in 1998, Douglas-Danielle is currently a division of TransUnion, offering products and services for launching, managing and optimizing campaigns across multiple channels.
In 2006, the Chicago-based division will be fully integrated into TransUnion, allowing it to offer a full suite of marketing services to its customers, said Douglas-Danielle president/CEO Mike Browning. Its agency services also include marketing functions such as program planning, creative, data and media along with program management.
“While we were once thought of as being competitive with Equifax and Experian, we will now have a much broader focus and will be competing with full-service companies such as Harte-Hanks and Merkle and also be able to compete more directly with Experian,” Browning said.
TransUnion had not exhibited at NCDM for five years, but decided to this year in part to promote the new direction, Browning said.
A key part of its offerings will be TransUnion Market Intelligence, a service that applies analytic and data mining tools to individual, household and market level data. Marketers gain immediate access to multidimensional profiling that can be matched to their current tactics.
The service is powered by the company's proprietary trend database, which uses a random sampling of more than 25 million consumer files. TransUnion has been collecting quarterly consumer snapshots since 1992 and has access to more than 1 billion consumer observations.
Also yesterday, TransUnion released research regarding bankcard growth in the United States. The findings indicate that consumers with TransUnion credit scores in the sub-prime risk category opened 16 percent more new accounts between the third-quarter 2004 and Q3 2005 versus the previous 12-month period. In contrast, consumers in the super prime and prime risk categories registered a decline in new account openings of 5.21 percent and 4.58 percent, respectively.
TransUnion said the research illustrates that bankcard marketers can benefit by knowing which segments of the population are most active in terms of new account openings.
