Acxiom’s 2017 Q4 performance was better than expected, as CEO Scott Howe’s plans to turn the company into a data infrastructure provider started to take form. Read the release. That transformation was evident in the company’s 2017 Q4 and full-year earnings report, released Tuesday. Acxiom earned $225 million in quarterly revenue, which was flat compared […]
Hulu is moving into phase two of its advanced TV strategy almost two years after launching its private exchange. But the market has changed since then, and Hulu has evolved its own ad technology stack in lockstep. For starters, Facebook shuttered the LiveRail supply-side platform (SSP) and ad server last year, so Hulu migrated to Tremor’s video SSP. Rather than entering a drawn-out RFP […]
Data management is like dental hygiene: No one enjoys doing it or even thinking about it, but you’ve got to stay on top of it or else the situation will get really messy really quickly. Joanna O’Connell, CMO of MediaMath, on Thursday moderated a panel about data management that felt like a good cleanse. […]
TV buyers are used to transacting on GRPs and Nielsen ratings, while digital buyers purchase targeted impressions. That has complicated the way advertisers plan, buy and measure their emerging cross-screen campaigns. Several companies have built tools to address the problem, but many have sold brand-direct or by way of the trading desk. RTL Group–backed VideoAmp […]
Addressable TV significantly expanded in 2016, both in terms of ad spend and the total size of the addressable market. In 2015, addressable TV ad spend reached $400 million in the US and grew to $890 million in 2016, according to eMarketer. That’s quadruple the spend flowing into the marketplace in 2014. Last year, more […]
Cross-device identity match rates have shot up in recent years, but brands and agencies remain skeptical of the results. “We were consistently disappointed with cross-device identity matches,” said David Kohl, CEO of the digital media advisory firm Morgan Digital Ventures. “There’s a gap in understanding of what’s possible between vendors and the buy side, [which […]
In an unusual partnership between agency and onboarder, DigitasLBi has teamed up with LiveRamp to sharpen and speed up the segmentation capabilities of its advanced analytics platform to drive more targeted campaigns. DigitasLBi said Thursday that it will leverage LiveRamp’s data connectivity services on IDIOM, its advanced analytics platform – still in the process of […]
There have been some significant organizational shifts within Acxiom in recent years. While the company was mostly known as a seller of third-party data sets – at least, by lawmakers in Washington – or as a builder of large, complex databases, Acxiom now wants to be considered a data infrastructure provider. That is, it wants […]
Acxiom has released an addressable TV product, built from a segmentation platform it acquired in early December from the Allant Group. The tool, announced this week at CES, leverages Acxiom’s workflow automation software and its relationships with multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). It’s not meant to execute on media buys. “We’re on a mission to […]
Acxiom’s data onboarder LiveRamp hopes to solve the thorny problem of identity – thorny because consumers have thousands of different identifiers. LiveRamp – which Acxiom now refers to as its Connectivity unit, but we’ll refer to as LiveRamp for the purpose of simplicity – has a solution to accomplish that using deterministic identifiers. On Thursday, it announced a partnership […]
Adobe rolled out the Audience Marketplace data exchange on Tuesday, featuring a data cooperative (which Adobe first revealed to prospective partners last summer) and a data partner network. Both are powered by Adobe’s data management platform, Audience Manager. The co-op aspect is designed to let companies pool their first-party data sets. The data partner network […]
A lot has changed, yet little has changed for Acxiom. On the one hand, it reorganized earlier this year, rolling its LiveRamp acquisition into a unit called Connectivity (overseen by Travis May) and hiring Experian Marketing Services vet Rick Erwin as head of audience solutions to work on its data products. Acxiom is also building […]
Equifax’s marketing services business has flown under the radar. The company manages a consumer credit database on some 600 million individuals and 80 million businesses and, unbeknownst to many, has a dedicated marketing services practice that competes with Experian Marketing Services. Called IXI Services, this division of Equifax helps financial services companies and other consumer […]
The story of Acxiom is one of constant evolution. Consequently, it’s also in what seems like a perpetual growth phase. With the development of its data-management platform Audience Operating System and its acquisition of data onboarder LiveRamp, it seemed to become a neutral infrastructure provider, the pipes facilitating the flow of information across its clients’ […]
Retailers and brands with physical locations are witnessing “an explosion of touchpoints in the ad and marketing tech landscape,” according to Travis May, president and GM of LiveRamp within Acxiom. The result is positive overall, he said, with marketers discovering new ways to demonstrate ROI and reach consumers across channels, but as that adoption takes […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Thaer Namruti, European strategy director at Acxiom. Before you can score points in any game, you need to know the rules. How is “winning” or “success” defined? In data-driven marketing, some […]
Salesforce.com wants marketers to know its paid media pitch extends well beyond the confines of social media now. On Wednesday, it revealed buyers can now activate CRM data for ad buys across mobile web, video, display and apps through a wave of new Active Audiences API partners: LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar, Krux and Viant. Although Salesforce.com […]
Retailers might look like they’re under siege, according to Gartner VP and analyst Andrew Frank, but they’re actually sitting on a pile of “underleveraged data.” Unfortunately, much of this data isn’t digestible by marketing technologists. In February, The University of Minnesota published a report demonstrating the causal relationship between search engine advertising and local in-store […]
A programmatic API for cable television? Cablevision, a telecom and cable systems company reaching 2.5 million households in the New York tristate region, claims it has developed one. It launched Total Audience Application (TAPP) last Thursday, an audience-planning tool that allows marketers to apply first- and third-party data to optimize addressable or linear TV campaigns. […]
Advertisers are no longer interested in hitting demo targets alone and, leading into upfronts, media companies are baking behavioral and audience-based guarantees into their sales pitches. Buy- and sell-side parties want to link TV programs with purchase propensity to determine whether a media exposure helped loosen purse strings. “We’re seeing more demand to bring together business […]
Acxiom vet Nada Stirratt is looking to spread the good word about location-based advertising in her new role as CEO of Verve Mobile, announced Monday. “The last few years have been about Angry Birds and app downloads, but now the market is finally talking about reaching consumers in particular locations,” said Stirratt, who comes to […]
You can’t un-ring a bell, but you might be able to un-hash an email, depending on whom you ask. In order for marketers to safely use hashes for targeted advertising, they must stay abreast of the latest hashing formats. Email hashing involves converting an email address to a hexadecimal string. Each time an email address […]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single company in possession of a good amount of data must be in want of an onboarder. Such was the case with LiveRamp, the onboarder who recently consummated its $310 million marriage to data services giant Acxiom, resulting in last week’s birth of LiveRamp Connect. This gene […]
For Acxiom’s 2015 Q3 earnings, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Or, in the words of CEO Scott Howe, “Spectacular growth in AOS and LiveRamp has been mirrored by declines in our core business.” Read the press release. Howe, speaking during the company’s earnings call Wednesday, was referring to the data connectivity […]
As it turns out, Acxiom’s LiveRamp and Datalogix were friends all along. The duo – sometimes portrayed as rivals in the data onboarding space – on Monday revealed they’ve expanded their existing partnership through 2017. At the time of Acxiom’s $310 million acquisition of LiveRamp last spring, CEO Scott Howe compared Acxiom to Switzerland. That is, […]
Matt Mobley has spent more than 14 years tinkering with databases. He served as Acxiom’s VP of European consulting, followed by a stint as SVP of solutions consulting at Epsilon, and is now chief marketing technology officer (CMTO) for CRM and database marketing agency Merkle. Under CEO David Williams, Merkle has moved in on search, mobile and […]
KBM Group might be the data services unit of WPP agency Wunderman, but don’t think of it as just a database manager. “Our job is to provide strategic leadership, not simply be a database vendor when clients need one,” said William Burkart, who became KBM Group’s president and COO in late September. So if you […]
In recent quarters, Acxiom’s financial narrative has focused on its struggle to redefine itself. Whereas Acxiom was once – and still is – known as a provider of data for marketers, it’s seeking to become a neutral provider of data infrastructure via its Audience Operating System (AOS) platform and LiveRamp, the data onboarder it acquired in July. This […]
Hearst Magazines plans to remove its marketing data from silos and bring it to the cloud using Acxiom. Hearst hopes this move helps it bring together siloed customer information. Finding the overlap between Hearst newspaper and magazine subscribers, for example, is a manual process under the current system. “If a customer engages with us in one […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is by Josh Herman, vice president of partner and product strategy at Acxiom. Addressable television has arrived, but where is it taking us? With a reach of more than 40 million households and […]
