Customer decisions are increasingly made in the moment, but many brands still rely on fragmented signals, disconnected identities and data that arrives too late to influence the outcome.

In this episode of The First Mile, Dom Burch speaks with Mike Danley, Vice President of Solution Consulting and Strategy at Acxiom, about how customer data has evolved from batch files and offline databases to real-time, cloud-native infrastructure.

Drawing on more than 23 years at Acxiom, Mike explains why first-party data has become one of a brand’s most important assets, why establishing an identity is easier than maintaining it, and why businesses need greater control over the signals generated across their websites and apps.

They also explore how AI agents are changing customer discovery and commerce, why the marketing technology landscape may be heading for consolidation, and how Acxiom and MetaRouter work together to help brands create “winnable moments” while customer intent is still live.

In this episode

• How Acxiom has evolved from direct mail and batch processing to cloud-native, real-time customer intelligence
• Why brands are taking greater ownership of their first-party data and identity infrastructure
• The risks created by fragmented tags, duplicated data and unnecessary data movement
• Why real-time customer context is now a commercial priority, not simply a technical consideration
• How Acxiom and MetaRouter combine behavioural signals with identity and people intelligence
• Why building an identity is relatively easy, but keeping it accurate and actionable is much harder
• How AI agents could reshape customer acquisition, discovery and transactions
• Why more marketing applications may collapse into the underlying data and intelligence layer
• What it takes to create winnable customer moments at the speed of now

About Mike Danley

Mike Danley is Vice President of Solution Consulting and Strategy at Acxiom. During more than two decades with the company, he has worked across architecture, product, client services, delivery and sales strategy, giving him a broad perspective on how enterprise customer data has changed and where the market is heading next.

Transcript:
Welcome And Guest Background
Dom Burch 0:08

Welcome back to the First Mile Podcast with me, Don Birch. This is the podcast where we explore the beginning of the digital journey, the point where every click, conversation, and interaction first take shape, and where the quality, identity, and governance of customer data are determined. And that's long before it flows into the big black box of Martec later down the line. I'm delighted this week to welcome Mike Danley, who is the Vice President Solution Consulting and Strategy at Axiom. Now, Axiom has been helping businesses make sense of customer data for more than 55 years. And Mike has spent, gosh, nearly half of those, 23 of those years, inside the company. So that gives him a rare perspective on how the market has evolved and more importantly, where it might be heading next. So we're going to be talking about why brands increasingly want greater ownership, control, and transparency over their first-party data, while real-time customer context has become a commercial priority, and what businesses should be asking about who controls their identity infrastructure and why Axiom and Metaruta are increasingly working together. Right, let's dive in. Mike, welcome to the First Mile podcast.

Speaker 1:17

Yeah, thanks for having me, Don.

Dom Burch 1:19

Now, I had the pleasure of getting to meet you in Denver a few weeks ago, right? And you you did this great fireside chat with Jamie from our team. So I feel like I know stuff about you, right? But 23 years in Axiom, 23 years in any company is almost unheard of, isn't it, these days? So what's your history? Tell us a little bit about your story.

Speaker 1:36

Yeah, absolutely. It is unusual. I think for me, it's just been, you know, been a journey. I would say, you know, the reason I've been here so long is just Axiom has given me a great opportunity to help clients solve problems, you know, and and starting 20 years ago, the problems were quite different than they are today, right? Um, certainly a much more batch-oriented world where things were on a latency of you know days or weeks, whereas today, you know, it's it's gotten into seconds, right? So things have changed quite a bit. You know, I've done quite a bit here at Axiom, starting with, you know, being an architect for one of our large banking clients, and then, you know, going through the organization as product, uh, client services and delivery, sales architecture, and then my current role here as a solution strategist and consultant.

Dom Burch 2:34

You've had that, I guess, experience where you could see things from like all dimensions, like almost like 360-degree. And then you must have also noticed over the years there's a sort of cyclical nature to innovation and technology. Like, you know, I was chatting to Databricks last week and we're just sort of laughing about you know FTP sites and big data. You know, I remember there's a lot, everyone's talking about all this big data, but we didn't know how we're going to crunch it. But also like the sense that I was sending you data, you were sending me back the same data, and it's like, you know, how quickly the

From Batch Files To Real Time
Dom Burch 3:05

world's moved on, right? But you must also see similarities with those cycles of of innovation over the last couple of decades.

Speaker 3:11

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I I think, you know, at the at the end of the day, clients are trying to solve their own problems, right? And so we have to keep that in mind, as you were sort of referencing early on. You know, from 20 years ago, that was really the only way to do what we do, which was to exchange data, large batch files through SFTP and then run it through these massive processes. Um, we actually did have a actually had a product called the big data environment, which was a huge data lake at the time, uh, before data lakes became a thing, right? And so there's always been a challenge of a large amount of data. Um, it's only gotten bigger over the last 20 years or so. Uh, but even 20 years ago, there was a massive amount of data being collected by brands. And the core problem is, you know, how do you consent it, govern it, link it, you know, merge it across different data silos, different applications. And the modes of doing that have changed, right? And innovated to where now with companies like MetaRouter, we can collect those signals uh in real time and we can transform them in session, consent them and distribute them right where they need to go, ready for use. Whereas, you know, historically it's been more of a kind of a lift-move uh issue, right? And you know, that's that's created a lot of challenges for brands over time because you know that's where you get things like data leakage, right? And you know, replicating data is never a good thing. Um, it tends to cause problems in the data, causes secure potential security issues, right? Um, through that data leakage. So it's not that brands necessarily ever wanted to do that, right? They certainly didn't, but I don't know that there was a way to do some of the things like uh our company would do for them without moving the data. So we would have to take a big feed, you know, put identity resolution on it to bring those data silos together, then enrich it with data insights like demographic data, and then either make it available in a hosted environment or push it back to the client. So yeah, that that has innovated quite a bit, right?

Dom Burch 5:30

And that'll be interesting to some listeners, right? Because they might know Axiom of old or have an impression of what Axiom is as a company. But how would you describe yourselves today in 2026?

Speaker 5:40

Yeah, I mean, we've evolved, right? Um, obviously we do have a lot of solutions still that do that, right? But for the most part, every new solution we approach is absolutely cloud-based. You know, it's cloud native. Um, and we look to drive minimal data movement. So we leverage data sharing or we leverage real-time signal capture like meta router to put the data where it needs to be in the format it's in and move it once, not multiple times. Um, this cle keeps the data more clean, accurate. You know, I think that's that's something that we've definitely done. I would say we've also evolved. I mean, obviously we've been bought by a couple of, you know, a media company, right? IPG and then Omicom bought IPG. And that has made us really evolve into the digital space and the media space a lot more than we historically were. We were very much offline, um, started in direct mail. You know, now we're very multi-channel in our thought process and how we approach the market, right? And obviously, you know, digital first is where most companies are.

Dom Burch 6:52

And I guess that means the kind of conversations you can have with customers today are different than the maybe even two or three years ago.

Speaker 6:59

Oh,

Data Governance And Vendor Fatigue
Speaker 7:00

yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I would say, you know, even three to five years ago, right? We had a very large audience, direct mail sort of mindset, but that that has rapidly evolved here into, like I said, that multi-channel conversation where we think about not just, you know, how do we help brands reach customers effectively in one channel, but how do we help them, you know, do things like uh media mixed modeling on the analytics side? How do we build those audiences? What are the best channels and way to help them acquire new customers or or retain existing ones? And then how do we measure that, right? So we think in a in a full closed loop as well.

Dom Burch 7:43

And you said that you know, brands increasingly want that ownership, right? They want control currency around their first party data. What was it that caused that shift?

Speaker 7:51

I honestly think that was probably always there. Like I said, I I think part of it was if you know, in order to leverage certain things in the market, whether it was Axiom or other components, software or other other services, sometimes there was no choice, right? And I think where the shift is coming is probably twofold. One is first party data is a brand's most important asset, right? And that's never been more true than today. And I think with that is a need to protect that asset. And so not exposing their brand and market to data leakage or uh a data breach, right? That's that's one big thing. So there's the whole security compliance aspect of it. The other is the number of vendors in the market. Look at Chief Martech that's been published over the last few decades, right? It's really gone up 10x plus. There are what 8,000 vendors out there now. Not that not that a brand's looking at all of those, but you know, what I think that speaks to is the amount of choice, but also speaks to the amount of noise and churn in the market. And so I do see with our brands and clients a lot of vendor fatigue. And there's a desire to minimize having to shift vendors once you make those decisions. That's really done by creating that centralized foundation and putting the control of the data in the hands of the brand so that they can then rotate the tech around it, not put all their data in the tech, right? And then then suddenly it's kind of locked in there. So I think that's another driver of that. Uh, you know, and obviously with the emergence of AI and things like that, um, first party data is absolutely key because AI has is in my mind changing the way brands need to think about customer marketing and and acquisition, right?

Dom Burch 9:51

We've got to AI already and we're only 10 minutes in, but it's inevitable, right? But but I guess the difference between having like batch data and real-time data is becoming a commercial issue rather than it just being a technical one, right?

Speaker 10:03

Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you

AI Agents And Speed Of Now
Speaker 10:05

think about the the change in the market in terms of, you know, like I say, if you know, we we live in a world of customer acquisition, retention, growth. That conversation has changed from brand customer to brand agent customer, right? Customers are increasingly using AI agents to do their research, right, and discovery, potentially even transact commercially. So at that point, decisions are being made in the moment, not down the line, right? I mean, I think there's always a case for brand awareness and certain things like that, but those real-time signals are going to be needed to actually be in the consideration set of those AI agents doing discovery. So, you know, I think it's becoming more and more important. So again, you know, you have first-party data that you know about the customer, but then those real-time signals with the context, behaviors, and then making you know things more machine readable, right, from a brand perspective is is increasingly important. And so that's going to be a real-time transaction.

Dom Burch 11:16

I mean, from your perspective, are you seeing more and more brands, more companies, maybe even more like IT teams within those companies, uh determined to own the underlying infrastructure, particularly, I guess, in some of those more regulated industries as well.

Speaker 11:29

Yeah, I mean, I think regulated industries, absolutely. If you look at healthcare pharma, um, they're doing with very sensitive, you know, PHI, um, you know, personal health information data, incredibly sensitive information. Uh, and then the same with with banking and and insurance, um, where you have underlying credit data involved as well. Yes, in those industries, you absolutely see a much more, you know, a much stronger desire to own that infrastructure. Um, and again, to keep that first party data within their own walls as much as possible.

Dom Burch 12:05

Now, when we were in Denver together, there were a few things that struck me. But one of the points you said was um customers rarely walk into a meeting and say, my data is fragmented, right? But what do what do they actually say? Yeah, you know, without giving everything away. You know, what are the kind of what are the kind of questions that customers are asking these days? And in that context, right, because I guess when businesses uh when they're embarking on sort of like data modernization programs, yeah, um, you know, what they need and what they think they're trying to buy aren't always matched, right? So there is a there's a degree of education involved as well, right?

Speaker 12:39

Right. Absolutely. No, I think I think the core of what they're trying to solve hasn't changed, at least in terms of, you know, the the business you know we do in the market, which is again, you know, helping customers acquire, grow, retain. I think that's still the core challenge. They usually come in with something like, I can't, you know, do X, Y, or Z, right? I can't um reach the right customers, or I can't very often I can't measure the effectiveness of my marketing campaigns, or you know, it takes too long, right? There's you know, there's too much latency here before I can take action because customers are, you know, shopping in the moment more and more, like we just described, and making those decisions, and I can't react fast enough, right? So that comes down to constructing better journeys or in the future, I think it'll be agentic workflows, right? So, you know, I think it being able to understand how to influence intent is is gonna be huge. And impacting those decisions, impacting that intent is really at the core of it. Um, but they articulate it many different ways. A lot of it's frustration with the ecosystem, right? My CDP isn't doing what they said it would do, or you know, I don't I have data in, you know, sometimes they will say they have data that's not connected, right? But that's you know, it's usually that's a core uh cause to a bigger challenge, which is, you know, I can't do my marketing effectively in the sense that I can't reach the right customers, I can't measure the effectiveness of those campaigns. Um, and you know, not everything's solvable, right? I mean, obviously

Fixing Web Signal Fragmentation
Speaker 14:30

there are certain constraints in the in the marketplace around measurement, for example. There are wall gardens like the Meta's and uh Google's and Amazon's, and and it's just their operating model. But you know, brands would love to get more impression level data out of those platforms, but it's just not going to happen, right? Nobody can, I mean, it's just the the business model that they have. So the data has to go into their platform. And so we we work around, you know, within the constraints of the ecosystem, but we we try to solve those problems for them best we can.

Dom Burch 15:04

We would often in our world describe, you know, like the first mile of data, right? As signals are being actually created, you know, somebody's browsing, somebody's clicking on your app or on your website. And that then being able to decide what you want to do with those signals as they're happening really helps everything else downstream work better, right? So, you know, your attributions better, your ability to measure the effectiveness of the media, whether it's your media or your retail media, you know, all those things become a little bit easier if you've put the hard yards in at the start, which is what are we doing with these signals and where where are we sending them? And and then what are we doing once we've sent them somewhere, right? And that sense of immediacy seems to be now. The risk, I guess, for some companies out there is that they're being put under pressure to harness AI, but the danger is if they don't fix that bit early, then kind of be like sticking clever AI on top of not very good data.

Speaker 15:57

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I you know, when I talk to clients these days and you look at the digital landscape of their own and paid media, I this is where I see parallels to 20 years ago, right? They have where you would walk into a brand, there would be you know multiple databases, maybe different flavors of databases with different schemas and nothing connected, right? It's all fragmented, each with its own identity resolution, each each with its own view of whatever it captured, right? And the the same things going on on the web page today, most brands don't realize it. So when you go out and you do a tag inspector and see 30, 40, 50, you know, 70 tags out there, every one of them is doing the same thing in the old batch world of it's collecting its own view of the data. It has its own identity, right? And so to your point, that fragmentation of the signal on the web page uh is where you know we partner with you guys to solve, right? Because you're able to do that first mile collection, you're able to pull all that into a view within the session. Then we add or infuse our identity and data into that view. And so now you have, you know, the behavioral and contextual consolidation as well as the people layer on top of that. Um, and then we're able to transform that based on the downstream destination, right? And so to your point, we're solving that problem up front. On the AI front, absolutely. I think getting that really collected well and fused with people intelligence as we push it into those agentic workflows as a destination, right? In the future, um, starting to happen now is is a huge, huge thing that is going to need to happen. Otherwise, you again, you're sort of operating from fragmented data or data that may be out of date, right? Or not actionable when it needs to be actionable, which is now sometimes.

Dom Burch 17:57

I was at um a drum live event last week in London and I heard the European CMO from Salesforce talking about how CMOs these days need to move away from being kind of like T-shaped to being A-shaped. And in her mind, that was kind of like creative on one axis and you know, data-driven on the other, but you need this sort of connecting part from one side or the other. CMOs are under a lot of pressure, right? But do you think there's a sort of rising acknowledgement at CMO level that they really need to own the identity? Like you're talking earlier about first-party data, you know, for a brand is its most important asset. Then being able to like really own that identity and know who that customer is in the moment and know what permissions you have to market to that customer, and know what their preferences are in terms of what the kind of things they want to buy from you, like all of that, you know, it feels still feel it feels like there's a little bit of work to be done around that. But do you think that that awareness is increasing?

Speaker 18:52

I do think it's increasing, and I think brands are understanding the challenge there, right? Um, we've had many brands working on this enterprise identity uh for a long time, right? And you know, I always like to say it's pretty easy to build an identity, it's very hard to maintain it. And that's because things change over time, whether, you know, it's a signal in real time that you need to react to or something you learn later, right, that you need to apply, like a life change event or or whatever it might be in terms of your customer's base. It's incredibly important to brands to understand who their customers are, right? So that they can take the right action. To your point, you know, the creative aspect of this is becoming more and more important as well, because you know, you you want to win the experience and the engagement. And creative plays a huge role in that, uh, to make sure that you're you know putting the right things in front of the customer at the right time so that you can understand their intent and you can act on it. Um, so I think that's that's incredibly important. But it's it's certainly I I do think a lot of brands also, like I said, they've been at it for years. Sometimes they they you know understand that they need help from uh a third-party identity provider like us at times to to really get it right and keep it right over time.

Dom Burch 20:15

Yeah, I was gonna say that because I mean clearly you guys have got like this enormous technology ecosystem

Identity Ownership Partnering With MetaRouter
Dom Burch 20:20

available, right? Yeah. And that and also now part of Omnicon, right? Which gives you the ability to look into your extended network and go, what are the other bits, right, that we can bring to the party? But um what led you to partnering with MetaRouter then? I mean, because I guess there's there's sort of um how do we fit in to help your broader axiom solutions deliver? Like what is that combination look like from a customer perspective?

Speaker 20:43

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's one 360 view, right? You can't really have a true view of the customer. I mean, we we've we've mastered that sort of offline view forever. Getting the digital view uh and footprint of a brand's customer base and prospect base, everybody who's visiting their home sites in particular, and connecting that to that offline data in the background, that's something you guys help us do, right? And then I think number two, it's creating winnable moments for the brand, right? Because again, people today are transacting at the speed of now, right? And you know, you really see that more, uh, I mean, that's even more, that's that's everyone, but generationally that's even more so, right? Because if you think about, you know, the the current generation, um it's you know what I see with brands who market to you know older consumers, builderways work fine still, right? They're still opening their mail, they're still looking at email. Yeah, there's they're online shopping too. They're not you know completely uh disconnected from the current world. But then if you start looking at you know the Gen Z and the future generations, they're incredibly Increasingly more digital. They're increasingly more about making decisions on research, right? And being able to influence that in the moment is critical, right? And so that's where you know you guys come in and sense of that first mile collection, the first mile enhancement of that and transformation of that data so that it can be pushed where it needs to be and acted on immediately, right? And that's critical. That's critical to create those winnable moments for brands.

Dom Burch 22:36

We're almost at the end. I can't believe it, right? It's flown by. A bit like our fireside in Denver, it's absolutely flown by. But what's the one piece of advice you'd give a brand that's beginning its first party data journey today? Now, and I and I say that with a degree of soul, right? Brands have always been dealing in first party data, but trying to trying to transform that into their ability to, like you've just described, right? That consent in the moment matters, the filtering, the transformation has to happen while the data's moving. You can't just deal with it afterwards, right? It's sort of like almost Patrick and I, who leads our AI charge, you know, we were talking about this a few months back and sort of saying, you know, those old ways of analyzing insight tomorrow in your data center is a little bit like picking over the bones in archaeology. It's like it's useful, right? But it's kind of telling you what happened before rather than allowing you to do what happens now, right? You was it you said we're transacting at the speed of now. I love that.

Speaker 23:32

Yeah, I think that I mean, there's a couple things, right? You know, first off, remember that the data on your website is your first party data, right? I mean, you you own the site, customers and prospects are coming to visit that site. And I think brands sometimes, in some ways, forget that or they don't connect the dots back to that as directly as they probably should. That means that in my mind, they want to control first-party data. So why wouldn't you want to control all the signals on your website? You should own those, you should not outsource those to media tags, etc. This then gives you the same flexibility you have in the Martech ecosystem, right? Where you can rotate out tags if you needed to, right? Or you can take them off the page and you don't have to worry about everything breaking. I think, you know, to your point on offline, there, you know, to me, it's both, right? You really need the ability to act in the now, but you also need the ability to look later and understand how things have worked uh so that you can create an optimization loop of sorts, right? So I don't know that everything is transacting at the speed of now, but you still are gonna need that historical perspective. You're still gonna need those, I think, analytic models, but they're gonna feed each other rather than run in isolation, right? And so I think the the digital online aspect is becoming more and more important and will probably be the most important place where a brand will win. But again, you know, still having that historical view is gonna be critical as well to make decisions and and understand how things worked or what didn't work and how to make adjustments and optimizations.

What Will Look Ridiculous In Five Years
Dom Burch 25:20

Now I've got an impossible question for you. So feel free to say, Dom, I've no idea I don't have a crystal ball. But what does the industry currently believe that's gonna look ridiculous in five years' time?

Speaker 25:32

Look ridiculous. Um you know what? I think probably maybe not owning the first mile that you guys talk about. I think it's gonna look ridiculous because you're just not going to be able to compete. I think the other thing that might be there is I think the ecosystem is collapsing a bit. You know, we talked about 8,000 plus vendors, but what I think you're gonna see is the application layer is starting to collapse in with data lakes. Everything's sort of going down funnel. Um, so if you look at like Databricks now with customer lake, they're putting a CDP in there, like that whole fragmented specialization, I think is a lot of that's gonna collapse . The reason I think that is if, and this comes back to the importance of first-party data in general, is that AI in particular is allowing us to operate directly on the data and then create value out of it versus having to put it in an external system to get the value. So it's just like I again, I think it's just you're gonna see a uh a thinning of the application layer a bit and it's gonna collapse into where the data lives, which is either coming in through a streaming system or within a warehouse, and you're gonna transact and react to that data right there with a lot of these functions.

Dom Burch 27:29

Brilliant. Mike, we're out of time, but thank you so much for sharing your insights. It's been brilliant. Like 23 years of experience in this world just at one company is amazing. I have my hat, I take my hat off to you. But for the time being, thank you so much for coming on to the first mile.

Speaker 27:43

Yeah, thank you for having me, Don. A pleasure.

Dom Burch 27:46

So there we go. Uh there was a phrase he used there, really stay with me. Creating the winnable moments. And I guess those moments depend on being able to understand and act on customer context at the speed of now, whether the goal is to acquire a new customer, grow an existing relationship, or retain somebody who might otherwise leave. As we discussed, establishing an identity is relatively easy. Maintaining it accurately, responsibly, and in real time across an increasingly complicated ecosystem is much harder. And that's where ownership, governance, and the right infrastructure really begin to matter. So, Mike Dalley from Axiom, thank you so much for joining me on the First Mile podcast. And thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.

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