Acxiom

With over 40 years of interactive marketing services experience, Acxiom enjoys worldwide success as a leader in providing consumer data and analytics, information technology, data integration and consulting. Throughout that time, a key contributor to the company’s long-term growth has been its impressive InfoBase system of interactive marketing databases that enables clients to build profitable business relationships with customers through deep insight into demographics, psychographics and behaviors.

In its next-generation InfoBase platform, Acxiom will utilize IBM® Netezza® data warehouse appliance technology. As with the classic InfoBase, the new platform will contain thousands of individual data elements reflecting demographics, lifestyle clusters, life events, consumer behaviors, buying activity and historical trends. The IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance will assist in streamlining management of the platform.

Using the extensive InfoBase database of consumer information as the foundation, Acxiom can apply logic and analytics to leverage this information in order to put data to work efficiently and effectively, helping clients to refine their marketing campaigns and strengthening their customer relationships by tailoring their customer interactions to each individual based on his or her characteristics and preferences.

InfoBase is the basis for well-established Acxiom data products such as Personicx® and InfoBase Enhancement, Consumer List, Life Events and more – each of which can provide unique consumer insight. Acxiom data products are based on current marketing information that can provide clients with the insight to enable them to deliver the right offer to the right individuals at the right time.

With ever-increasing client demands, ever-growing data volumes and an ever-changing industry, Acxiom has set three strategic goals in order to remain the leader in its market:

• Maintain the quality of its database in order to consistently provide the most complete, accurate and current consumer insight information available, covering every household in the U.S. This has always been a core tenet at Acxiom, and one that the company is committed to upholding even as business – and data volume – continues to grow. Accommodating this growth requires a data warehouse that can offer seamless scalability, high performance and near real-time data refreshes. More specifically, Acxiom wants the ability to add new data to the database at any time, even before an existing data process cycle is complete. Doing so will enable the company to avoid data latency issues so that Acxiom can continue delivering fresh, up-to-date data to its expanding client base.
• Simplify its operational approach, consolidating various products’ data into a single, comprehensive database to avoid siloed or redundant build-to-delivery processes. With a multitude of products using the same input files being processed simultaneously, the build-to-delivery process could become siloed and, in addition, there could be some risk of data redundancy. The new platform must meet Acxiom’s high standards of efficiency while avoiding siloing and redundancy and must also have the ability to get new data into the database quickly, identify where new data collides with existing information, and then apply business logic to decide which data is accurate. In addition to making life easier from an administrative point of view, the ability to bring the data for all products together into a comprehensive database makes Acxiom’s value proposition simpler and more appealing to clients who will be able to further customize their own solutions as the result.
• By making proactive recommendations based on a client’s specific needs and/or recent events, Acxiom can increase its value provided to clients. Rather than simply reporting on what happened yesterday, Acxiom seeks to predict what will happen tomorrow in order to recommend a tailored plan of action for each client.

After evaluating multiple options (including several technologies) toward achieving these strategic initiatives, Acxiom determined that Netezza, now an IBM company, would be its best choice for successfully accommodating the consolidation of data from Acxiom’s products while enabling Acxiom to provide to its clients extremely fast performance and scalability at a reasonable cost.

Multi-sourced data acquisition differentiates Acxiom’s offerings
With the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance, Acxiom has the ability to acquire data from over 10 times as many sources as some of its competitors, further expanding its already leading edge data accuracy, data quality and match rates.

Changes signal opportunities
Life events affect consumers dramatically – they start new jobs, move to new locations, get married, have children – and these life changes affect consumer purchase patterns. Companies trying to keep pace cannot afford to wait days or weeks for information that no longer reflects the actions, behaviors and preferences of the consumers they want to reach. Information used to address today’s consumers must be fresh and accurate – nobody wants to receive a compelling financing offer three weeks after buying a new car.

The parallel architecture and advanced filtering mechanism of the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance will enable Acxiom to quickly pinpoint changes in the database and verify the currency of those changes. It takes the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance just two to three minutes to process bulk data loads, which means that all changes to the database can be introduced within hours of the actual change or event, enabling Acxiom to proactively reach out to clients with suggested actions as new events occur that trigger new marketing opportunities.

Identifying lifestyle information and changes
Personicx, Acxiom’s premier household-level segmentation system, specializes in identifying consumer lifestyle information such as age range, family demographics and income. Acxiom’s Personicx database utilizes segmentation codes that categorize households into a particular lifestyle group based on demographic and behavioral characteristics. The Personicx code applicable to a particular household may not change very often, but when a major life event occurs that does change the Personicx code, it is extremely important for Acxiom to make the change within its database in near real time, provide that updated data to its clients, and make proactive marketing recommendations to its clients based on each client’s unique goals.

About Acxiom
Acxiom is a recognized leader in marketing services and technology that enable marketers to successfully manage audiences, personalize consumer experiences and create profitable customer relationships. Our superior industry-focused, consultative approach combines consumer data and analytics, databases, data integration and consulting solutions for personalized, multichannel marketing strategies. Acxiom leverages over 40 years of experience in data management to deliver high-performance, highly secure, reliable information management services. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, and serves clients around the world from locations in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and South America. For more information about Acxiom, visit www.acxiom.com.

About IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances
IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances revolutionized data warehousing and advanced analytics by integrating database, server and storage into a single, easy-to-manage appliance that requires minimal set-up and ongoing administration while producing faster and more consistent analytic performance. The IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance family simplifies business analytics dramatically by consolidating all analytic activity in the appliance, right where the data resides, for industry-leading performance. Visit ibm.com/software/data/netezza to see how our family of data warehouse appliances eliminates complexity at every step and helps you drive true business value for your organization. For the latest data warehouse and advanced analytics blogs, videos and more, please visit: thinking.netezza.com.

About IBM Data Warehousing and Analytics Solutions
IBM provides the broadest and most comprehensive portfolio of data warehousing, information management and business analytic software, hardware and solutions to help customers maximize the value of their information assets and discover new insights to make better and faster decisions and optimize their business outcomes.

For more information
To learn more about the IBM Data Warehousing and Analytics Solutions, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner or visit: ibm.com/software/data/netezza.