SAN FRANCISCO – Acxiom Corp. unveiled its new positioning yesterday at ad:tech San Francisco to focus on audience management and consumer experience personalization, with mobile being a key part of the equation.

The Little Rock, AR-based company is reinventing itself in the backdrop of a fragmented marketing environment generating data requiring increasingly sophisticated levels of targeting. The makeover also includes the launch of Acxiom Relevance-X, a multichannel suite using channels such as online, mobile, addressable television and social media to target customers and prospects.

“What this show is representing for us is a very deliberate repositioning of the company,” said Michael Darviche, New York-based chief marketing officer and senior vice president at Acxiom.

The shift toward marketing technology and services will combine Acxiom’s data and technology assets including consumer data, consumer recognition, analytics, interactive and direct marketing strategy, delivery optimization, media targeting and client databases.

Getting a cross
Ad:tech San Francisco marks the beginning of a major Acxiom marketing blitz promoting the change in direction, including a new tag line due out later this year.

The company is running prominent signage at a show estimated to attract 12,500 delegates, more than 10 percent of whom are paying full board to attend the two-day show.

Acxiom handles database marketing tasks for 350 of the top 500 brands nationwide. Its service offerings span major marketing channels, but mobile marketing is increasingly becoming a strong focus.

The company’s Acxiom Relevance-X Mobile suite lets clients use direct marketing principles through mobile Web display advertising.

Essentially, clients can target mobile Web consumers with the same data principles that they use for other channels and with access to premium content publishers and wireless carrier portals. Location is another component offered.
Acxiom also has insight into the inventory of carrier partners AT&T and Sprint.

“To be really effective in advertising and marketing, you need to be multi-dimensional,” said Tim Suther, senior vice president of multichannel marketing services at Acxiom. “It’s that complete picture. We’d like to connect the dots to make the consumer engagement more useful and to make advertising better performing.”

Asset base
Acxiom is banking on several assets to deliver on its new promise. The list comprises a matching engine, profiles, 300 million U.S. consumer personas and 200 million overseas, 270 staffers in analytics and consulting and strategic campaign management with the Impact Plus platform.

Other assets are the company’s media optimization abilities and the cloud for real-time processing of data – decision engines that facilitate transactions in real time.

“Certainty is our thematic key positioning,” Mr. Darviche said.

“The old positioning was that we were a company that was providing high-precision granular parts and today we’re rolling these together to promise value-added programs to clients,” he said.

“It is applying the important offline principles of database, analytics and campaign management and applying them in the online world and particularly in the new devices and handhelds. We feel that in the next six months, mobile will mature to the point where the many principles of the offline world are going to be needed.”