Press Releases May 25, 2005

Pearl River Resort hits the jackpot with SAS

SAS® Marketing Automation to support Pearl River Resort’s entire marketing process
CARY, N.C. (May 25, 2005) — Pearl River Resort, a major destination resort and casino in Mississippi, provides a virtual paradise for its guests: two Las Vegas-style casinos, a 36-hole golf course, a water park and white sand beach, along with numerous stops for dining, shopping and other entertainment. With so much to offer, Pearl River Resort is becoming increasingly popular throughout Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. To assure long-term success, marketing executives are looking for programs that will enhance their guests’ visits.
As a cornerstone of its marketing strategy, Pearl River Resort has selected SAS, the leader in business intelligence, to supply the software that will provide executives with the power to know their guests better. By using SAS® as a driver of its marketing strategy, executives at Pearl River Resort will centralize the company’s guest data and manage its marketing campaigns to cultivate high-value repeat guests. This will lead to increased guest satisfaction and return visits.
“We are looking forward to fully integrating the SAS solution into our Resort marketing plans,” said Pearl River Resort President Chuck Miller. “The information we collect will now be easily accessible, ensuring unparalleled service to our guests on return visits. We feel this system will bring us closer to the vision the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Chief Phillip Martin and the Tribal leaders have for Pearl River Resort.”
In order to make its marketing programs more interactive and targeted, Pearl River Resort needed a 360-degree view of its guests that incorporated information from all touchpoints and channels. Past efforts were hampered by guest information, such as room preferences, favorite games, restaurant choices and demographic data, being housed in disparate operational systems. Using SAS Marketing Automation (www.sas.com/solutions/crm/mktauto), Pearl River Resort will build a consolidated data warehouse to gather all this information in a central location and provide fast, consistent, flexible reporting and analysis. To improve the quality of its data, Pearl River Resort also uses the latest technology from DataFlux®, a SAS subsidiary (www.dataflux.com), to parse, cleanse and standardize information prior to loading the data into the warehouse.
Applying SAS advanced analytics, such as data mining, segmentation and behavior analysis, to this enhanced guest information will enable Pearl River Resort to determine guest preferences and conduct statistically valid test campaigns. With SAS Marketing Automation, they will be able to target specific offers and promotions to the Resort’s most valued guests. The SAS Marketing Automation solution will also capture key information required to accurately measure campaign success including a complete picture of response rates and ROI.
“We are sitting on a world of information about our guests and prospects. SAS is uniquely positioned to help us understand our guest base and maximize our return on marketing initiatives,” said Jason York, director of database marketing and special projects at Pearl River Resort. “We believe that SAS Marketing Automation will help Pearl River Resort maximize every guest relationship and support the entire marketing team by providing improved efficiency and effectiveness at every stage of the marketing process.”

INTEGRATED MARKETING SOLUTION FROM SAS A SAFE BET
The Pearl River Resort management team considered piecing together tools from a variety of different vendors but chose SAS because it had the most complete and most powerful solution.
“With one integrated solution from SAS we will have total control of the marketing process, from learning and understanding guest behavior, to predicting future behavior, then creating targeted campaigns and learning from results and refining the strategies,” said Brent Pinkston, CRM consultant for Pearl River Resort.
“We looked at many different vendors and evaluated their potential as long-term partners. SAS has a track record of partnering and growing with their customers and this set them apart,” said John Enriquez, vice president of IT for Pearl River Resort. “Looking ahead, we plan to use SAS to evaluate the efficiency of operations and make better business decisions in core operations. SAS will be the foundation for a great deal of long-term learning.”
Qualex Consulting Services, Inc., a SAS partner, will lead the implementation project at Pearl River Resort. “They are a critical partner in this whole initiative,” added Pinkston. “The people at Qualex have worked with SAS for many years and this huge knowledge base and experience has made the implementation project virtually transparent.”

ABOUT PEARL RIVER RESORT
Pearl River Resort, the Southeast’s premier destination resort located in Choctaw, Miss. near Philadelphia, Miss., features two highly successful Las Vegas-style casinos and two luxurious hotels, the Silver Star Hotel and Casino, and the Golden Moon Hotel and Casino, as well as the Tom Fazio and Jerry Pate designed 36-hole award-winning championship golf course Dancing Rabbit, Geyser Falls Water Theme Park, Clear Water Key and The Beach Club, 14 restaurants and a variety of retail shopping venues. Pearl River Resort is a development of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

ABOUT SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at 40,000 sites — including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500® — to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW® .