Arkansas lost a public company but didn’t lose jobs when Acxiom Corp. sold its largest business unit, Acxiom Marketing Solutions, for $2.3 billion to the Interpublic Group of Cos. Inc. of New York.
The transaction closed last month, but all of Acxiom Corp.’s employees are still here — in Conway and Little Rock — executives of the two companies left in the deal’s wake told Arkansas Business. Both have kept a few C-level executives in the state as well.
About 1,300 people in Arkansas now work for IPG-owned Acxiom LLC, which was AMS. To be operated as an independent company, it has gained clients under the corporate umbrella of IPG and expects top-line revenue growth as a result of combining forces with IPG.
Another 50 Arkansans work for publicly traded company LiveRamp Holdings Inc., Acxiom Corp.’s remaining business unit, which was originally a company Acxiom acquired in 2014 for $310 million.
After the sale of its AMS unit, Acxiom Corp. was renamed LiveRamp, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RAMP) and moved its headquarters to San Francisco, where LiveRamp was based when it was bought.
Acxiom LLC employees will continue to work from Conway and Little Rock, but LiveRamp employees will be moved to that company’s office at 301 Main St. in Little Rock.
For Acxiom LLC, the employees in Arkansas represent half of a global workforce that totals 2,600.
Asked why the company isn’t moving those people, Acxiom LLC President Dennis Self said, “Arkansas, a lot of folks don’t know, has a very rich capability, or competency, around data. … The real differentiator for Acxiom — and I would make a case for Arkansas, specifically Little Rock and Conway — is that competency around handling data, around managing data, and I’m talking about consumer data specifically. That is something that is a hidden gem.
“It takes many years to build up these capabilities. In fact, it’s taken 40-plus years to build up these capabilities. You can’t just pick up and go to another city and say, ‘Hey, let’s do this same thing somewhere else,’” Self said. “If we did that, we’d have another 40 years in front of us trying to replicate what we do.
“So what we’re doing in Arkansas we’re going to double down on, and we’re going to continue to build those capabilities, grow those capabilities, as we scale our offerings over the IPG network.”
‘An Incredible Group’
The Arkansas-based LiveRamp employees represent 8 percent of a workforce that totals 650.
The company also has a still-growing client base that has doubled to about 650 over the past two years and includes industry-leading global holding companies, advertising agencies and publishers, according to Jerry Jones, executive vice president and chief ethics and legal officer.
Why is the company keeping people here? “Why not?” Jones said. “On a historical basis, Acxiom benefited from an incredible group of people that are highly intelligent, well-educated, work hard, work smart and have a phenomenal work ethic. We expect to be able to do the same with our colleagues that are now within the corporate structure of LiveRamp.”
The LiveRamp employees in the state include lawyers, privacy specialists, finance people and software engineers who will work on LiveRamp’s identity-centered product suite and primarily its AbiliTec technologies, Jones said.
‘Business as Usual’
Acxiom LLC employees in Arkansas are helping the company sell consumer data, data products and marketing services, “all for powering the marketing capabilities of big brands,” Self said.
Mary Ward, vice president of human resources, emphasized that “people are still working on the things they were working on prior to Oct. 1, when we actually became a part of the IPG family of companies. Everybody is really doing the same things they were doing before.”
She added, “So not a whole lot has changed.”
What has changed is the number of clients Acxiom LLC serves.
Self said the rationale behind IPG’s acquisition of what is now Acxiom LLC is that IPG has 4,000 well-known brands as clients. Acxiom LLC had 2,000 clients.
“The plan is we’ll do exactly what we do today at Acxiom, but we’ll take our offerings and we’ll try to expand over that base of 4,000 clients that they have that we don’t already do business with,” Self said.
“That’s the strategic rationale. It’s business as usual, keep doing what we’ve been doing for many years, keep doing it with the same people that we’ve been doing it with for many years, but do it for many other clients where IPG needs us and our offerings.”
Acxiom LLC’s client base includes industry-leading credit card issuers, retailers, insurance and health care providers and technology, media and telecommunications companies. Acxiom is doing business with about half of the Fortune 100, he added.
Self elaborated on how IPG and Acxiom LLC will work together.
“IPG, what they do is a lot of creative services, a lot of what they call media buy services, a lot of analytics services,” he said. “So it’s not that we will create new functions for Acxiom or new functions for IPG as much as we will fuse together what they do with what we do, so there’s a tighter integration between our offerings that we can take out to market together to all those clients.”
Self said IPG acquired Acxiom LLC for revenue synergies, top-line revenue growth, not cost synergies. “I think it would be a reasonable expectation that Acxiom and IPG will continue to grow in mid-single digits on the top line and continue to adhere to the expectations that are already in place for our bottom line. I know that doesn’t provide a lot of specificity, but we’re still trying to lay out the go-forward plan,” he said.
Integration planning will continue for another three to six months, but the company should be able to provide more clarity on its expectations early next year, Self said.
$1 Billion Goal
LiveRamp has more specific goals. Over the next five years, it plans to reach $1 billion a year in revenue, Jones said. That’s more than four times the $220 million in revenue the company reported for the fiscal year that ended March 31.
Jones also said the company will reach its $1 billion goal by improving its products and services and offering new products and services, especially in the business-to-business, second-party data, public-sector risk, health care and identity providers categories.
In addition to Jones, the other LiveRamp C-level executive in Arkansas is Sheila Colclasure, senior vice president, global chief data ethics officer and public policy executive.
Meanwhile, half of Acxiom LLC’s leadership team, including Self and Ward, are based in Conway and Little Rock. That team includes those who lead sales and account management, product engineering and finance for the company, Self said.
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