Pretend you work in the marketing department of an online university. You have a list of hundreds of thousands of potential students that you could target with the school's next direct mail campaign, but know the majority won't respond. Constrained by a limited budget, you need to show results. How do you choose your targets, and how many flyers can you send – at great expense – before you risk losing money? That was the dilemma faced by a client of Redmond, Washington-based data technology services firm Versium Analytics Inc., which answered with a question of its own: what if, within hours, we could build a customized predictive model for you, use this model to score to each of your potential targets, rank them in descending order, and prove that 80 per cent of your future students would be among the top 20 per cent, and that only two per cent would be among the bottom 40 per cent?