Acquisition of LiveRamp
On May 14, 2014, Acxiom announced that it had acquired LiveRamp, a data onboarding company, for $310 million.[26] LiveRamp was co-founded in 2011 by Travis May and Auren Hoffman[27] as a spinout of RapLeaf, a marketing data and software company founded in San Francisco, California in 2005 by Hoffman and Manish Shah.[28][29] LiveRamp's services combined customers' CRM and loyalty program data with other available data sources, to better segment and target consumers. Acxiom kept the business operating under the LiveRamp name under the leadership of May.
In July 2015, the company sold its IT outsourcing division, Acxiom IT Outsourcing (Acxiom ITO), to Charlesbank Capital Partners and M/C Partners, and Acxiom ITO was subsequently rebranded as Ensono.[30] In December, Acxiom acquired the Boston-based advanced-advertising unit of Allant, a third-party data shop focused on advertising and marketing.[31]
In November 2016, LiveRamp acquired two data and identity-matching startups, Arbor and Circulate, for more than $140 million combined.[32] The company also announced the launch of IdentityLink, a method of anonymizing consumer's identities as they are tracked across multiple platforms.[33] In August 2016, Acxiom sold its marketing automation solution, Acxiom Impact, for $50 million, to New York City-based marketing firm Zeta Interactive, now Zeta Global.[34] The company was also named in Glassdoor's top small company to work for.[35]
By 2017, LiveRamp was reportedly worth $1.5 billion.[36] In January 2017, Acxiom launched Audience Cloud, an anonymous targeting tool that allowed demographic segmentation of customers without revealing their actual identities.[37] On March 10, Acxiom announced that it was moving its headquarters back to Conway, Arkansas after selling its corporate office building in Little Rock, Arkansas. The building was acquired by Simmons Bank.[38] In May, LiveRamp announced a consortium formed with two other ad tech companies, AppNexus and MediaMath, to compete with Facebook and Google in the area of programmatic advertising, the term used to refer to the use of automation software to buy advertising.[39]
In February 2018, LiveRamp acquired Pacific Data Partners, an aggregator of anonymized business data.[40] Also in February, Acxiom announced a reorganization from three divisions into two - a Marketing Solutions group and its LiveRamp business.[41] In May, the company announced international expansion into Brazil, Netherlands, and Italy, and released Global Data Navigator (GDN), a portal for identifying available data elements by country.[42] In June 2018, Consumer research firm GfK MRI has partnered with Acxiom.[43] In July, advertising company Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) announced they were buying Acxiom's Marketing Solutions (AMS) business for $USD2.3 billion. The deal did not include the LiveRamp business.[44] Also in July, LiveRamp announced a partnership with tracking software company Sonobi to help publishers sell targeted digital ads.[45] The sale of the Marketing Solutions business to IPG closed in October, and Acxiom officially changed its name to LiveRamp, and its ticker symbol to RAMP.
In April 2019, LiveRamp acquired consent management platform provider Faktor.[49] In July, LiveRamp acquired the Boston-based television analytics company Data Plus Math for $150 million.[50]
