Acxiom

Acxiom is one of the oldest names in the consumer-data industry. Charles D. Ward founded the company in 1969 in Conway, Arkansas as Demographics, Inc., initially producing mailing lists from phonebooks and providing payroll processing services. The company renamed itself to Conway Communications Exchange in 1980, incorporated as CCX Network, Inc. in 1983, and finally became Acxiom Corporation in 1988.

The corporate structure today is the result of a significant 2018 restructuring. In July 2018, Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) announced it would acquire Acxiom Corporation's Marketing Solutions division for $2.3 billion. That deal closed in October 2018. After the sale, the remaining Acxiom Corporation renamed itself to LiveRamp and continued as a publicly traded identity-onboarding business (NYSE: RAMP). The Marketing Solutions division kept the Acxiom brand and continued operating under IPG ownership as Acxiom LLC.

The ownership chain shifted again very recently. On November 26, 2025, Omnicom Group Inc. closed its acquisition of IPG, making IPG a wholly-owned Omnicom subsidiary. That means Acxiom LLC is now ultimately an Omnicom property (Omnicom trades on the NYSE as OMC). The acquisition closed after a US FTC antitrust review and a consent order; the merger was announced December 8, 2024.

The scale Acxiom operates at has been a long-running story in privacy reporting. The 2012 New York Times profile of the company described Acxiom as having "the world's largest commercial database on consumers" - a framing that has been carried forward in subsequent policy and academic coverage. Acxiom's product is not a consumer-facing search site; it sells data-management, identity-resolution, and audience- targeting services into the advertising, marketing, insurance, and risk-management industries on a B2B basis.

Acxiom's two documented security incidents are old, and both were federally prosecuted. Both predate the 2018 split, so a note on which company they belong to: the records taken were the marketing database that Acxiom LLC runs today, which is why they count here, while the legal entity that held them then, Acxiom Corporation, is the one that renamed itself LiveRamp and kept the onboarding business. Between December 2002 and January 2003, Daniel Baas, a systems administrator at a contractor that analyzed data for Acxiom, exceeded his authorized access and downloaded encrypted Acxiom password files; he pleaded guilty in December 2003 and was sentenced to 45 months in 2005, with Acxiom putting the cost at $5.8 million. Between January and July 2003, Scott Levine, the controlling owner of the bulk emailer Snipermail, took more than one billion Acxiom client records containing names, postal and email addresses and phone numbers; a jury convicted him on 120 counts of unauthorized access in August 2005 and he was sentenced to 96 months in February 2006. Those incidents are what the prior-data-incidents score on this page reflects.

Acxiom LLC sits inside one of the world's largest advertising holding companies. The corporate family as of November 2025 is set out below.

Acxiom doesn't have a consumer-product Trustpilot or Sitejabber presence in the way the people-search brokers in this directory do - because end consumers aren't the customer. The BBB profile carries an A+ rating and the company has decades of trade-press, policy, and academic coverage. The most useful trust signal for consumers is the litigation and regulatory record.