I just returned from a few days at the DMA conference in Boston. As usual, Alterian had booth space at the show, and we also participated in the Event Triggered Marketing Solutions session, a real-time showdown with two of our key competitors, Unica and Neolane. This session, run by a neutral moderator, gives each participant a campaign challenge and scenario long in advance, asks them to set up the challenge in their systems, and then each have a 15 minute portion of the session to show the audience how they would solve the particular challenge with their software.

While we have done this many times before, the difference this year was a potential crisis. The crowd filling the room looked to be in the typical range of 150 or more people. Up front were the representatives from each of the three companies, talking amongst themselves. But as the conversation went on, Mike Fazio, our presenter quickly realized the scenario they were discussing did not match his. After inquiring further, he realized the campaign challenge scenario he had built was for the NCDM conference –not the DMA challenge – and in no way compared to what was about to be shown. The other two presenters empathized with Mike’s situation and agreed to go first. They suggested he watch what they presented and try to just talk to it, since his campaign set up did not match, and they both agreed there was no way there would be time to build a new one.

Instead, Mike used the 30 minutes before his presentation, sitting at the presenters table in front of everyone, to start from scratch and build a completely new campaign including analytics, segmentations, customer triggers and calculations, and more. He then stood up 3^rd in line and presented the full scenario and campaign in a flawless fashion, unbeknownst to anyone else but those 3 presenters in the room.

The moderator and two other presenters were amazed he and our software were able to build up all steps of a real scenario and campaign both in that amount of time and in front of all the people without anyone realizing it, let alone Mike’s ability to present it in front of everyone flawlessly. Even though I had seen dry runs of his presentation, I did not notice what he was doing. And though the presentation seemed different to me, I did not catch on until I was told later.

Obviously, congratulations go out to Mike for the great job he did. I told him such, and he came back to me with an enthusiastic response excited with what our software allowed him to do. The fact that I didn’t even know what was going on was what he was most proud of. He later told me, “That was the most rewarding part – knowing that no one in the audience could tell what I had just experienced, even those who had already seen a dry run.  I could have never accomplished this using another solution, or even the older versions of our software.  But most of the credit really goes to Alchemy and to our developers.  They have really created something special.”

Once the stress of the potential crisis was over, he could enjoy the excitement of pulling off such a challenge in such a time frame. It doesn’t get much more “real” than that, and as Mike reflected, there are always times in a marketer’s life when they realize something is wrong in a campaign and they have little to no time to solve it… but have to.

What could have been a real crisis turned out to be the best demo I’ve ever seen. Especially when I learned the details behind it. I just wish we had been allowed to tell everyone in the presentation what had just happened. It would have impressed them all the more.