Acxiom Corp. has again ranked second on Advertising Age magazine’s April 29 list of marketing-services agencies of all disciplines. The list ranks companies by U.S. revenue in 2012 — $678 million in Acxiom’s case.
A story accompanying the 2013 list explains why the Little Rock data company is on the list of advertising and marketing firms — answering a question Acxiom CEO Scott Howe asked when his company popped up on the 2012 list, according to the article.
“Indeed, Acxiom — based in Little Rock, Ark., more than 1,200 highway miles from Madison Avenue — is not by definition a classic marketing-services agency,” writes Kate Kaye in the article. “However, just as agencies are building out robust data-management and -analysis services for their brand clients, old-school data aggregators like Acxiom are moving onto agency turf. … [T]here’s no question Acxiom is in the agency game. The firm offers its clients teams of art directors, copywriters, information designers and web developers. It handles things like marketing-mix modeling for clients and provides marketing strategy, channel development and multichannel communications.”
More Rankings
Acxiom also showed up on some of Ad Age’s companion lists.
It’s No. 11 on the list that ranks agencies by worldwide revenue. Acxiom’s worldwide 2012 revenue was listed as $823 million. (Where this number came from is unclear. Acxiom’s fiscal year begins on April 1, and it reported $822 million in total revenue for the nine-month period that ended Dec. 31, 2012. That was a decline of 2.5 percent from the same nine-month period in 2011.)
Acxiom ranked No. 19 on the magazine’s list of the world’s largest agency networks. The company also ranked No. 4 on a list of agencies making money on worldwide customer-relationship management and direct marketing and No. 2 on the U.S. version of the list.
Other Arkansas firms on the 500-company across-disciplines list:
- Saatchi & Saatchi X of Springdale, No. 224, with U.S. revenue of $34 million.
- Rockfish of Rogers, No. 258, with estimated revenue of $29.4 million.
- Mitchell Communications Group of Fayetteville, No. 444, with $13.7 million in revenue.
- Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods of Little Rock; No. 491 with estimated revenue of $11.4 million.
At the end of 2012, Mitchell Communications was sold to Dentsu Network of Japan, which ranked No. 1 among agencies worldwide with estimated revenue of $2.7 billion.
