Home Analytics Acxiom Prepares New ‘Audience Operating System’ Amid Wobbly Earnings

Acxiom Prepares New ‘Audience Operating System’ Amid Wobbly Earnings

SHARE:

Scott-HoweLittle Rock, AR-based Acxiom is gearing up to launch an “Audience Operating System,” for cross-channel and cross-device ad targeting, in September. “The world is coming to us as big data and insight-based decisioning is exactly what we do,” CEO Scott Howe said during the company’s earnings call. “It is also exactly our vision for the Acxiom Audience Operating System. Our technology will enable one-to-one targeted marketing at scale across all channels and to all devices.”

A spokesperson declined to provide additional details about AOS, which is in beta. The platform is expected to leverage the company’s databases and segmentation models to provide enhanced ad targeting options.

According to Howe, the firm has nearly 1.1 billion third-party cookies that it has dropped on users who visit its clients’ webpages. “Our mobile reach now exceeds 200 million customer profiles [and] we now have over 50 publisher and developer partners,” he continued. “Our digital reach will soon approach nearly every Internet user in the US.”

The upcoming AOS launch comes amid revenue declines for Acxiom. Q2 marketing and data services revenue shrank 2% to $266 million. And IT infrastructure management revenue decreased 1% to $69 million.

Analyst Dan Salmon at BMO Capital Markets remains optimistic about the marketing platform, noting that “last night’s earnings likely scares out some investors that were holding it for the wrong reasons (takeout speculation that started after Salesforce bought Exacttarget), but we’d expect true believers in the AOS product rollout to build positions ahead of the September launch.”

Salmon also applauded Acxiom for re-incorporating its email business into its core marketing services as “the Rodney Dangerfield of digital marketing [i.e. email] continues to be re-evaluated by marketers that see it as a key way to reach mobile users.”

Must Read

Monopoly Man looks on at the DOJ vs. Google ad tech antitrust trial (comic).

2025: The Year Google Lost In Court And Won Anyway

From afar, it looks like Google had a rough year in antitrust court. But zoom in a bit and it becomes clear that the past year went about as well as Google could have hoped for.

Why 2025 Marked The End Of The Data Clean Room Era

A few years ago, “data clean rooms” were all the ad tech trades could talk about. Fast-forward to 2026, and maybe advertisers don’t need to know what a data clean room is after all.

The AI Search Reckoning Is Dismantling Open Web Traffic – And Publishers May Never Recover

Publishers have been losing 20%, 30% and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year due to the rise of zero-click AI search.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

No Waiting for May – CES Is Where The TV Upfront Season Starts 

If any single event can be considered the jumping-off point for TV upfronts, it’s the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES), which kicks off this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Comic: This Is Our Year

Comic: This Is Our Year

It’s been 15 years since this comic first ran in January 2011, and there’s something both quaint and timeless about it. Here’s to more (and more) transparency in 2026, and happy New Year!

From AI To SPO: The Top 10 AdExchanger Guest Columns Of 2025

The generative AI trend generated endless hot takes this year, but the ad industry also had plenty to say about growing competition between DSPs and SSPs. Here are AdExchanger’s top 10 most popular guest columns of 2025 and why they resonated.