Patent ID: 6957189

Claim:
A method for creating at marketing initiative comprising the steps, performed by a processor, of: inputting offer parameters for a new initiative, including an initiative time period and an initiative description; associating customer selection criteria with the offer parameters; determining a likelihood that the new initiative will be effective prior to use of the new initiative using stored statistics reflecting hit rates based on characteristics of other past initiatives, where the hit rates indicate the number of times an initiative was selected as being relevant to a customer request; providing a result indicating the effectiveness of the new initiative; and storing the new initiative in a database based on the result, wherein said determining step comprises: receiving, at a runtime offers subsystem, a sales request from a marketing host; extracting key values from said sales request, said key values including customer selection criteria; creating key structures using said key values; compressing said key structures into a series of key-paths; and searching said database using the key-paths to determine an initiative that is most relevant to the sales request.