ABSTRACT
The marketing industry is undergoing incredible changes, due to the continued increase in digital advertising. Traditionally, marketing was dominated by direct mail. Direct mail marketers purchase names of consumers most likely to be interested in the product they’re selling, craft a print advertisement for those consumers, and mail them out to households across America. Although the US conducts a very accurate and complete census on every individual every 10 years, this information is compiled at the census block level, not the individual level. Breaking that down to a zip code or zip+4 level means making some very general assumptions. A generic model is a project in which there’s no specific client who has contracted for the work. Rather, the product is being built on the hope that many different clients will be interested enough in the final result to purchase the data field for use in their own business.
