Lists: Behavior Matters Most

When asked if the Abacus file was being overfished, Susan McIntyre, owner of McIntyre Direct, says:

Good models should overcome overfishing. Everybody had a bad year, and it may be that since Abacus was acquired by DoubleClick, the programming may be rushed, and less thought has gone into the models. If you work closely with Abacus, question them, push them to do things differently, force them to really think about the model, talk about all the points, examine all the catalogs on the synergy table, take into consideration gender, say, for example, “Did you know we have four specific niches ...”—you can make Abacus work for you. But you have to push them hard; you have to be knowledgeable. When building the initial model, you cannot say, “Just do your regular model.” Instead, you have to feed them a lot of data and force them—force them to run three different models and test them against each other.