Acxiom Corporation

The Acxiom River Market Tower is a twelve-story corporate office building just south of the River Market in downtown Little Rock. Photo by Phil Frana.

The Acxiom Corporation is a public corporation headquartered in Little Rock and Conway, Arkansas. Acxiom specializes in data mining, business databases, grid computing, direct marketing technology, and customer relationship management software. It collects information on more than ninety million households. The company competes in the marketplace with Experian Information Solutions, D & B, and Harte-Hanks.

The company had sales of $1.3 billion in 2007-2008. Acxiom employs about 6,600 people across the United States and in eleven foreign countries. The chief executive officer at Acxiom is John Meyer. The company is organized into four main divisions. Three of the divisions are managed from Arkansas: Data Products, Services, and Financial Services. The fourth division, Outsourcing, is managed from Downers Grove, Illinois. The company has offices in London, Paris, Phoenix (Arizona), Sunderland (England), and Sydney.

Clients include Advance Publications, Allstate Insurance, AT & T, Bank of America, Citigroup, Conseco, Federated Department Stores, First USA Bank, General Electric Capital Corporation, IBM, The Polk Company, Proctor & Gamble, Sears, Trans Union, and Wal-Mart.

Acxiom Headquarters

Acxiom's $25 million twelve-story headquarters, the Acxiom River Market Tower, at 1 Information Way in downtown Little Rock is only three blocks from President Clinton Avenue. The new headquarters, completed in 2002, meant a shift in administration away from the old headquarters in Conway. During the Clinton Library dedication in November 2004 Acxiom employees were warned to refrain from bringing deer hunting rifles to work with them because the Acxiom River Market Tower overlooked the presidential library site. November is prime deer hunting season in Arkansas.

Early Company History

The company owes its origins to Ward School Bus Manufacturing owner Charles Ward. Ward incorporated Demographics in 1969 to meet the needs of local Democrats who wanted to create mailing lists competitive with their rival Arkansas Republicans under the leadership of Winthrop Rockefeller. At this point it was largely a printing business, as the company occupied a 6,000 square-foot building housing an IBM 370/167 mainframe computer and press (near the present Smitty's Bar-B-Que on Harkrider Avenue. One client was the bus company itself. The company soon expanded to cover other data processing needs. In 1975 the company began using its lists in direct mail operations. It entered the payroll processing business and handled billing for the local utility Conway Corp. Its most reliable customer at the time was the Hot Springs, Arkansas, developer Diamondhead.

Charles Morgan Takes the Helm as Company Leader

Ward divested himself of Demographics in 1975 in the midst of personal financial hardship. Charles D. Morgan, an IBM-trained manager of the company since 1972, became the new president and CEO. Revenue by the middle of the 1970s had increased to $1.2 million. Diamondhead went out of business and election law changes conspired to cause the company to reevaluate its business plan. Morgan traveled to yellow pages maker Direct Media Inc. in New York. There he met with David Florence to discuss changes in the operation, and decided to focus exclusively on direct-mail technology. Morgan returned 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.

The company changed its name to CCX Network [Conway Communications Exchange], Inc. in 1980, became a publicly traded company in 1983, and acquired its current name Acxiom Corporation in 1988.

Acxiom's directors spent about $1 million looking at electronic mail as a future marketing technology, but eventually wrote off the effort as a failure.

Acquisitions and Brands

In 1986 Phil Carter joined the company as president. Carter and Morgan began making aggressive acquisitions together. That same year the company acquired Southwark Computer Services of the United Kingdom. In 1988 it became the Acxiom Corporation. In 1989 it closed down the operations of one of its acquired companies, the catalog-maker BSA Inc. In 1991 the company endured a real low point, caused in part by steep postal cost increases and a recession. In 1995 it forged a strategic alliance with The Polk Company. In 1996 it engaged in a strategic partnership with Oracle, sharing its own data warehousing technology and decision-support systems in exchange for Oracle database suppot and online analytical processing (OLAP). When David Florence moved to sell his stake in Direct Media, Morgan moved in to acquire the company in 1996. Around 1997 Acxiom acquired healthcare direct marketer Buckey Dement, KM Lists, Normadress, National List Protection, and MultiNational Concepts.

Around 2000 Acxiom made major purchases of capital stock in Pro CD, a maker of reference data CD-ROMS. Pro CD technology allowed Acxiom to move into smaller market niches, like list management for small businesses, and Internet provision of services. It sold the retail part of Pro CD to American Business Information in exchange for more proprietary technology.

Contracts with Allstate Insurance and Trans Union benefited the company enormously at the end of the 1990s, and revenue grew from $89.7 million in 1989-1990 to $964.5 million in 1999-2000. In 1998 the company acquired its primary competition in Illinois-based May & Speh Inc. for $625 million in stock. The company benefited from the client base of May & Speh and also its corporate headquarters operation in Downer's Grove, a Chicago suburb. One combination of technology from these two companies - the May & Speh Quiddity system and the Acxiom Data Network - allowed customers to use and manipulate company data online over the Internet in realtime.

In the early 2000s the company continued to make strategic acquisitions, including Phoenix-based Computer Graphics, Inc., Horizon Systems Inc., and Marketing Technology, S.A. of Spain. It formed an alliance with Dun & Bradstreet, sharing its InfoBase in return for business marketing data. Similar alliances were struck with Broomfield, Colorado's Abacus Direct Corporation and Palo Alto, California's E.piphany. The company also acquired customer database integration technology from AbiliTec and the real-time Solvitur enterprise codebase from Active Software.

In 2007 the company acquired consulting and data analysis firm Equitec.

The company's demographic marketing product is called Personicx. Other company brands, trademarks, or operating units are Opticx, Acxiom Information Security Services, and Postal Optimization Products and Services.

Over the past two decades Acxiom also became well-known for its collaborative team-oriented management and work structure, leading to its being named a Best Place to Work several times by Fortune magazine. By the first decade of the twenty-first century work at the company was organized into three fairly independent "silos" for technology and outsourcing, marketing, and data products.

Privacy and Security Concerns

A consumer privacy backlash has in some ways defined the operations of the company since the mid-1990s. Acxiom suffered from some public and legislative fallout over its for-profit data aggregation services in these years. To counteract this impression Acxiom entered into agreements with the Direct Marketing Association to develop "opt out" methods for customers who did not want their information entered into Acxiom's burgeoning databases.

Since 2000 two major security breaches attracted national attention. One of these computer break-ins resulted in what has been called "the biggest data heist ever."

The company currently houses more than 850 terabytes of data and twenty billion customer records.

John Meyer Takes Over as "Company Leader"

In July 2005 Acxiom's largest shareholder, the hedge fund ValueAct Capital Partners, launched a hostile corporate takeover of the company. ValueAct offered to buy outstanding shares of the company for $23 and then $25 dollars, but the company board of directors rebuffed the offer. In May 2007 Charles Morgan announced a $3 billion plan to take the company private. When this bid failed, Morgan retired from the business and the company agreed to acquisition by ValueAct and Silver Lake Partners in a $2.25 billion deal.

In February 2008 John Meyer became the chief executive officer of Acxiom. Meyer reorganized what he called the "nebulous" organizational structure of the company, dividing it into divisions focused on Customer Data Integration & Marketing Services, Information Products, Digital Marketing Services, Consulting Services, IT Services, and Background Screening Products

Meyer also repositioned Acxiom as a "global interactive marketing services company."

References

• Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart (New York: Bantam Books, 2007), 134-135.
• James Gordon, "Acxiom Transforms, Performs," Arkansas Business, December 25, 2006.
• John Hama, "Acxiom to Pay $625 Million for Chief Rival," Arkansas Business, June 1, 1998.
• Janet Novack, "The Data Miners," Forbes (February 12, 1996): 96.
• Sara Olberding, "What Makes Acxiom Corporation Such a Success," Journal for Quality and Participation (November-December 1997): 46.
• Jon Parham, "Did Short Sellers Help Push Down Acxiom Stock?" Arkansas Business, September 6, 1999.
• Jon Parham, "Record Revenues Fail to Deter Acxiom Suits," Arkansas Business, January 31, 2000.
• Jack W. Plunkett, Almanac of American Employers (Plunkett Research, Ltd., 2007), n.p.
• "Pro CD, Inc. Acquired by the Acxiom Corporation," Information Today, (May 1996): 39.
• Catherine Reagor, "Arkansas-Based Acxiom Corp. Acquires Phoenix-Based Computer Graphics Inc.," Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News, June 18, 1999.
• George Waldon, "Acxiom's Turnaround: Will It Continue?" Arkansas Business, November 16, 1992.
• Jamie Walden, "New Acxiom CEO Seeks To Bring Focus to Firm," Arkansas Business, July 21, 2008.
• Wythe Walker Jr. "Acxiom's Growing Pains," Arkansas Business, February 4, 1991.

External links

• Acxiom homepage
• MSNBC - Office memo: Don't bring guns to work