SAS increases PlayPhone’s profitablity

Improved customer insight raises subscriber revenues

LONDON – Global mobile media company PlayPhone is using SAS software to respond more quickly to consumer trends and drive higher revenue. By enabling the company to understand the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns and redeploy marketing spend most effectively, SAS helps PlayPhone increase profitability per subscriber and reduce costs for acquiring new ones.

PlayPhone, which provides cutting-edge personalisation and entertainment content to mobile consumers, is using SAS, the leader in business analytics, to generate effective marketing campaigns in its fast-moving consumer marketplace. Using SAS, PlayPhone can now analyse its customers’ behaviour, understand the costs it incurs per subscriber, identify which subscribers are most profitable and target marketing campaigns appropriately. By enabling PlayPhone to better understand its customers, SAS has helped the company to mitigate the effects of customer churn whilst minimising the cost of customer acquisition.

“We had to find out how much a subscriber cost us, how long they stayed with us and how much profit we made from them,” says Simon Rose, Director of Infrastructure at PlayPhone EMEA. “We had to compare that with the cost of marketing in order to understand campaign success, so we could redirect money from poorly performing campaigns into successful ones. The faster we can make those decisions, using SAS, the less money we waste and the better and faster our return on marketing spend.”

SAS has provided PlayPhone with a complete marketing solution, from data analysis for conceiving a campaign, through to its roll-out, evaluation of its effectiveness, and finally to understand the return on investment and profitability of each customer.

Rose continues: “Compared with what we were doing previously, our ability to make the right decisions and act on them fast has improved beyond all recognition. The speed of access to data is a huge benefit of SAS. It’s breath-taking how quickly we can get to the data and make the correct decisions, which has resulted in less wastage. Consumers in this sector are very fickle and certain content will be ‘flavour of the month’; if you can respond fast, it can make a real difference to the bottom line.”

Ian Manocha, Managing Director of SAS UK adds: “The nature of this sector and its consumers, demands that content providers, like PlayPhone, understand and respond to changing demands fast. SAS has positively impacted PlayPhone’s profitability by helping it to become a highly agile business that can respond quickly to customer and market trends.”

SAS implemented its business intelligence software at PlayPhone, with support from implementation partners Amadeus Software Ltd, in the first half of 2008.
About PlayPhone

PlayPhone is a leading global mobile media company present in 20 countries throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America that provides cutting edge personalization and entertainment content in multiple languages to mobile consumers anytime, anywhere. PlayPhone founded the direct-to-consumer mobile media distribution standard in 2003 and continues to establish new means for delivering wireless entertainment. PlayPhone is based in San Jose, Calif. and is funded by top venture firms Menlo Ventures, Cardinal Venture Capital and Scale Venture Partners.

About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. With innovative business applications supported by an enterprise intelligence platform, SAS helps customers at 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know®