The business that became Acxiom was founded in 1969 as Demographics, Inc. by Charles D. Ward in Conway, Arkansas.[4] In 1988 it became Acxiom Corporation, and by 2012, the New York Times reported that the company had the world’s largest commercial database on consumers.[5][4]
On May 14, 2014, Acxiom Corporation announced that it had acquired LiveRamp, a data onboarding company, for $310 million.[6]
In January 2017, Acxiom Corporation launched Audience Cloud, an anonymous targeting tool that allowed demographicsegmentation of customers without revealing their actual identities.[7]
In February 2018, Acxiom Corporation announced a reorganization into two divisions - Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) and LiveRamp.[8] In July, advertising company Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) announced they were buying Acxiom Corporation's AMS business for $2.3 billion.[1] In September, Acxiom Corporation officially changed its name to LiveRamp, allowing the AMS business owned by IPG to keep the Acxiom name.[3][9] Also in September, the company introduced an open data framework allowing clients to combine online and offline data sources.[10]
Acxiom provides anonymized customer data to marketers, allowing the delivery of more relevant ads to consumers, with more effective measurement.[11]
Acxiom's client base in the United States consists primarily of companies in the financial, insurance and investment services, automotive, retail, telecommunications, healthcare, travel, entertainment, non-profit and government sectors.[12]
Products
Audience Cloud identifies anonymous audience segments, and matches them with publications to display targeted ads when a member of the audience visits a particular site.[7]
Global Data Navigator service allows agencies to select global data elements by country.[13]
InfoBase is the company's brokered warehouse of consumer data.[14]
Unified Data Layer (UDL) uses cloud architecture to help firms connect online and offline data, to better identify consumers' identities, with a goal of complying with GDPR privacy laws.[10]
