Charles Morgan Jr.
Charles D. Morgan Jr. was longtime chief executive officer of Acxiom in Conway and Little Rock, Arkansas.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Morgan was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1943. He received a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1966.
Demographics
Morgan had been a manager at IBM.
Morgan joined Acxiom, then known as Demographics Inc., in 1972 as the vice president under company president and CEO Charles D. Ward. Ward divested himself of Demographics in 1975 in the midst of personal financial hardship and Morgan became the new president and CEO.
Revenue by the middle of the 1970s had increased to $1.2 million. When one of the company's key clients, Diamondhead, went out of business and election law changed Morgan and the company's leadership was forced to reevaluate its business plan. Morgan traveled to yellow pages maker Direct Media Inc. in New York. There he met with a friend David Florence to discuss changes in the operation, and decided to focus exclusively on direct-mail technology. Morgan returned to Conway with the kernel of an idea for what became the List Order Fulfillment System (LOFS), with Direct Media as the sole customer. LOFS has been described as the nation's "first fully-automated, on-line system used to generate mailing lists." By 1978 the company touted that it had created the first comprehensive "marketing database" in the United States.
Acxiom Corporation
Morgan was responsible for the transitioning of the data processing company into a billion dollar information management solutions firm. The company changed its name to CCX Network, Inc. in 1980, became a publicly traded company in 1983, and acquired its current name Acxiom Corporation in 1988.
Morgan is a former member of the board of trustees of Hendrix College, an institution to which he has donated millions of dollars. He is also a race car driver.
References
- Robert O'Harrow Jr., No Place to Hide (Simon and Schuster, 2005), 34-36.
