- Acxiom's database has over 500 million active consumers, and average of 1,500 data points per consumer. Profits of $77.6 million in last fiscal year, with sales of $1.13 billion.
- Congress and privacy advocates taking notice, calling for more transparency and openness
- Acxiom's difference is a treasure trove of offline data they have been collecting for 40 years, allowing them to integrate offline, online, and mobile data to create "360 degree" view of consumers.
From the article:
IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.
It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.
Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing...
