Vice President, Information Products

(FreeOnline Australia Pty Ltd - Feb '00 to Dec '00)

Role

Led a team of Market Research, eCRM and Data Warehousing professionals to store, analyse and understand online behaviour, and to extract commercial benefit from the enormous volumes of Web data generated. When I joined the company it had around 100,000 accounts; at its peak we were managing 500,000 accounts generating almost 10 gigabytes of data a week.

Major Achievements

  • Built an effective team, combining marketing and data management skills, that could meet internal and external clients' needs end-to-end.
  • Built a Data Warehouse that successfully combined static demographic and interest data with Web surfing data and with third party (Census) data. The Data Warehouse comprised more than 30 tables and 1000 elements, and was updated daily with more than 20 million rows of data.
  • Used the Data Warehouse to produce highly targeted web-based campaigns that produced extraordinary response rates (eg 30%+ click-through rate) for clients such as National Australia Bank, eBay, Seek, Hotjobs and Wishlist.
  • Performed strategic analyses that:
    • helped position FreeOnline as the Number 2 ISP in Australia, with a registered base in excess of 500,000 accounts.
    • segmented the customer base into 288 distinct segments to allow unique offers to be made to specific segments.
    • significantly enhanced FreeOnline's understanding of customer satisfaction, web use and key product features.
    • led to the redesign of the FreeOnline product set, resulting in an increase in paying subscribers of over 400%.
  • Defined and operated processes that integrated online targeting with e-mail based targeting and allowed the targeting of different messages to different individuals through different delivery channels.
  • Negotiated a deal with Sinewave Interactive in which FreeOnline provided aggregated, anonymous data in return for cash and reporting services. Earned over A$2,000 per month.
  • Performed a one-off analysis for eBay of the web usage of its customers relative to that of its competitors'. Sold for A$3,000.
  • Defined a suite of three report types for FreeOnline clients ranging from simple visitor analysis to complex, bespoke reporting. These reports were generally bundled with other FreeOnline services, but, conservatively, were responsible for A$10,000-15,000 of revenue per month.
  • Key member of the team that secured A$124m in funding from Concert, a joint venture between AT&T and BT, to globalise the Sharinga products and processes.