Data provider Acxiom opens up its turnkey marketing analytics environment

Marketing data provider Acxiom is now making generally available its turnkey environment that fully integrates its LiveRamp acquisition from 2014.

The new offering, called the Acxiom Marketing Analytics Environment or AMAE, had been available since last July, but only to selected clients.

Prior to that, Marketing Services president Dennis Self told me, brands required custom setups for most engagements.

Now, AMAE offers a standardized, ready-to-go environment for collecting, combining, managing, analyzing, modeling, and exporting big data from multiple sources, both online and offline. The company says that standing up a data collection and analysis environment for a brand can now be accomplished in days or weeks, instead of months or even years.

Here’s a screen from the AMAE dashboard:

Nearly two years ago Acxiom bought LiveRamp, which specializes in onboarding offline and other data into analytical environments. AMAE represents the first full integration of that acquisition, and is designed for making datasets available to external analytics and modeling tools, as well as to marketing/advertising platforms. AMAE can also perform its own analysis and modeling.

Common goals for the use of this data — which often employs as many as 1500 attributes to define each customer profile — are customer acquisition and customer journey analysis through targeting, retargeting, segmentation, and personalization.

Self noted that Acxiom emphasizes its “people-based,” non-cookie approach to connecting data sources, like matching the person who bought shoes in a physical store to the user who bought socks in an online outlet.

The idea is to connect offline activity data, first-party data from the client’s customer relationship management system or other sources, and third-party online data, so as to generate the oft-sought single view of the customer.

Acxiom commonly uses a non-cookie element as the matching link, like a common email address or phone number. The combined profiles are eventually delivered to clients with privacy-compliant anonymous IDs. For targeting — such as delivering online shoe ads to the segment of users that includes this person — cookies might be employed along with other identifiers, such as a mobile device ID.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.