Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Acxiom Fiscal 2016 Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct the question-and-answer session instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Mrs. Lauren Dillard, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome. Thank you for joining us to discuss our fiscal 2016 fourth quarter and full year results. With me today are Scott Howe, our CEO and Warren Jenson, our CFO. Today’s press release and this call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a detailed description of these risks, please read the Risk Factors section of our public filings and the press release. Acxiom undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to any of our forward-looking statements. A copy of our press release and financial schedules, including any reconciliation to non-GAAP financial measures is available at acxiom.com. Also during the call today, we will be referring to the slide deck posted on our Web site. At this time, I will turn the call over to Scott Howe.

Thank you, Lauren. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. I am excited to report another solid quarter, and I am very pleased with all we have accomplished in the last year. By any measure, fiscal 2016 was a year of tremendous progress and we are a much stronger Company today than we were a year ago. Our divisional structure has allowed each business to move faster and innovate against its unique opportunity set, and at the same time work toward the shared vision of powering the world where all marketing is relevant. Our mission at Acxiom is to make it safe and easy to activate data anywhere. Marketing has never been so complex, and innovation has produced an explosion of data, channels, devices, and applications. We provide the data foundation marketers’ need to make everything in their stack work together better. We make it safe and easy to activate, validate, enhance and unify data, so that clients can deliver relevant messages at scale and tie everything back to real results. Each piece of our business executed soundly against this mission in FY16, allowing us to deliver greater results to our clients, while also creating value for our shareholders. In the last year, our Connectivity division has emerged as the clear category leader in data on-boarding and connectivity, and our recent results demonstrate the strong network effect of this business. At the same time, both Marketing Services and Audience Solutions are finding their stride. And the fourth quarter marked the second quarter in a row of top-line growth across the board. During my portion of the call today, I will update you on each of our businesses and in that discussion share our strategic priorities for FY17. One of our top priorities for the coming year is to secure…

Thanks, Scott and afternoon everyone. In my portion of the call today, I'd like to first run through the quarter, then talk about each of our segments and finally provide guidance for FY17. A few highlights from the quarter overall Q4 was a great finish to the year and the single strongest quarter Acxiom has reported in a long-long time. Total revenue was up 9% and excluding the impact of FX and items, revenue was up 10%. For the second quarter in a row each of our divisions posted top-line growth. In the U.S., total revenue increased to 11% representing the seventh sequential quarter of positive growth. Excluding items international revenue was up 5%. Revenue in Europe excluding items increased 21%. Our adjusted gross margin improved by over 500 basis points to 47% driven by improvements in Connectivity and Audience Solutions. Connectivity had another impressive quarter. Revenue was up 62% and our revenue run rate exiting the quarter grew to over 110 million. Connectivity gross margin improved to 63% and operating income was nearly breakeven again this quarter. Finally, we were EBITDA positive in Q4 and for the year. In addition last month, we successfully launched LiveRamp in the UK and France to meet the growing demands from customers and partners in those geographies. Marketing Service revenue for the quarter was up 3% in total and 4% in the U.S. And Audience Solutions revenue was up 4% in total and 6% in the U.S. And finally during the quarter, we repurchased $15 million of stock, since inception of our repurchase program we have acquired 15.5 million shares for total consideration of 255 million. Taken together, we are moving forward and making progress against our stated priorities, doubling down on connectivity and seizing the opportunity, returning our core business to growth…

Thank you, sir. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Dan Salmon of BMO Capital Markets. Your question please.

I think, Warren, if we could just dive a little back into the guidance, I think probably where the components are coming in differently than most models out there is largely around Impact. And I know it's not a super material part of the business, but it does seem to be having a material impact on Marketing Services guidance and overall. You're obviously not alone after having seen Epsilon put up a relatively weak quarter and it’s more agency services as well, so I was curious if you could shed a little light either you or Scott on what's going on around there. Is it something that is specific to Impact, is it maybe perhaps that the holding company is data driven type of agency services are proving and we're seeing a shift over to that type of business there? And then maybe I'll just start there have one follow-up after this.

Yes so Dan, this is Scott. And I think you're right to put things in perspective, I mean this represents roughly 8% or so of our overall revenue. The challenge of course is that it somewhat masked a lot of the great stuff that's happening all around it in Marketing Services, it’s a drag I expect better from them. And they have a very strong reputation for client service in the industry and they have ranked number one in some ratings on client service, but what happened in recent months is that in this business relative to say like Marketing Database switching costs are lower. And so they have experienced churn and the team simply hasn’t won new business to offset that. So now what we do about it? Well, number one, we're evaluating our path forward here and that starts with we have to a better job of evangelizing what's unique about us, service, client results that is do a better job of ensuring that prospects understand the synergies of email with the rest of our portfolio and the fact that we can really drive data driven targeting and do some interesting cross channel things. And then we have to explore how we can better land new clients, so we know we're facing some headwinds there, but we also feel like we understand what's driving the problem and now need to set up about fixing it.

Okay so it sounds like more you're playing to simply reinvigorating the new business pipeline and processes rather than something secular there, is that fair Scott?

Yes, I am not seeing secular, I will say that, and this anecdotal, we feel like we've gotten to kind of the final two or three or far more RFPs in the last year than say in the proceeding several years, but for whatever reason we're just not crossing the finish line first.

And then just one quick follow-up for Warren is there any share buyback assumed in the EPS guidance?

Our all assumptions are included, yes, Dan. So, in the share count for example that contemplates our buyback.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brett Huff of Stephens. Your question please.

We're trying to assess out a little bit on the REV guidance, you mentioned that you got some revenue shifting going on at GMS and things like that, but I think there's a question maybe of conservatism to you, so given that your fiscal '16 REV guidance, you beat it by 20 million-25 million bucks in $0.08 on the bottom-line, ex the tax benefit. How much of this is conservatism and how much is it specifically maybe the Marketing Services decline, can you box those for us, so we understand what the outlook is?

Brett here's what I would say is, one, our guidance is what it is and what we try to do is to play it call it between the 40 yard line, is it's just is what it is and you should assume that it's right down in the middle of the field. We have taken into account in our guidance the declines expected from Acxiom Impact and as a result we thought it was important to note that as Scott mentioned the positive performance in Marketing Services is going to be offset by declines in Impact next year, so we do expect revenues in Marketing Services to be down as a result. And if I could just put a fine point on that and it's the point that was made in the formal part of my remarks, the Marketing Database and Consulting business is 85% of the revenue in this business. In the last three quarters this business excluding Impact has grown, in the fourth quarter it grew by 8%. So, we feel very positive, it's not that we're done yet by any stretch in Marketing Services, we feel very positive about that core element of our business. But obviously Impact is having negative effect on our comps year-over-year.

And then just my follow-up is, just relative to the street, the $0.55 guide in the bottom-line versus the $0.60 street expectation is about $0.10 obviously and that seems to imply about 12 million in cost. I think you called out 20 million of cost just specifically on Connectivity, ex that incremental cost is there anything else that we need to know about, investments that we haven't talked about yet, that are really inhibiting the margin profile, that I think we and the street expected?

No, the only thing that I would call out in addition to that is, there is a negative effect from Impact that we've got to wrestle with inside Marketing Services and that impact takes place not only on the top-line but also on the bottom-line to some extent. And as Scott said we're all over fixing that. The second element of color I would add is that we very carefully looked at the investments in Connectivity and in LiveRamp, because obviously if we weren't investing that money you could post a much higher number on the bottom-line, but when we took a look at our growth opportunities and our long-term aspirations, we felt the investments in the match pool were important that Scott highlighted we're now over 60 million mobile matches. We felt that it was the time to capitalize on really the data driven marketing movement that is taking place in Europe, so we're launching in France and the UK and building our match pools there which is costly and a continued investment in our operational sales and product capabilities. So, very carefully thought through and for long-term value we thought absolutely the right thing to do.

And my last question just a commentary on I think in -- Scott you talked about this I think a little bit already, maybe Warren you did as well, but on the Connectivity business, the 60% growth in the subscription transaction revenue sounds great. How quickly will this transition happen, so that now we can maybe get the -- is this GMS sort of grow over, is it a -- do we kind of get through it this year and then we can look out for a little bit cleaner number in the future, so how do you guys see this kind of phasing?

We'll have to see Brett, I would tell you it should mostly happen this year, but I can't guarantee it'll be 100% of the way through, but we'll -- what we will do as we tried to on this call, we'll try to really keep everybody focused on the underlying drivers of growth and that inherently is going to be subscription revenue in Connectivity. Keep in mind just to try to help everybody quantify that, of the $400 million GMS number on the trailing 12 months about 30% of that is associated with first-party GMS. So -- and then you can make your assumptions around royalty rates and that's the number that we think will slowly come down.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Bill Warmington of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

So, I wanted to ask about the GMS conversion, when you're moving that to subscription basis typically how long are the contracts, are they one year or multiyear?

Bill I would look at it differently. I wouldn’t look at this as now we’re signing a new subscription agreement, I would look at it as we have an arrangement in place with a big advertiser for on-boarding and every year the way we’re thinking about things, we want to make the feature set and the capabilities and what we offer just more valuable, enhance it to just create a much more robust environment, which is very typical of how any growth company would work is you just want the feature set to become that much more valuable to our client. So, I would look at it more as a emerging of subscription opportunities into our core underlying growth rate.

Is it less seasonal?

It should be to some degree less seasonal depending upon what’s going on. We obviously had a pretty doggone impressive Q4 having had sequential growth coming off Q3, excuse me off the holiday quarter, if you will. I think we’re clearly benefiting a little bit from pretty crazy political season too. So that impact shouldn’t go unnoticed. But yes it should be some degree less seasonal.

Then on the digital impact, how long before you turn the corner there with that business? When do cycle again? When does it stop going down? When do we cycle against that?

Hard to say I mean, it could be as much as a year Bill but could be earlier. But it's all dependent on how quickly the team can get new client wins. So, growth fixes all problems. And what you’re seeing here is churn without the corresponding new client wins. So, this is within the teams purview to fix, they just got to, instead of being one of the finalists, be the only finalist.

Hi Bill, just to be clear, in our estimates that we’ve shared with you, we are anticipating declines in each quarter of FY17 for Digital Impact and again I am speaking of the Digit Impacts slice.

Well you gave some phasing for the revenue that was helpful and gave the first quarter for EPS. I was just going to ask if you wanted to give any additional color in terms of how we spread the EPS out for the rest of the year?

No, I don’t think so. I think you all have our history and our tendency is we really don’t want to give quarterly guidance, but we also want to be helpful in the near-term as we can be.

Thank you. And at this time, I’d like to turn the call back over to our CFO, Warren Jenson, for closing remarks, sir?

Terrific, well, thank you everyone for joining us. This was a great quarter and as I mentioned right at the outset, probably the strongest that Acxiom has had in a long-long time. I’d like to just leave you today with three thoughts that we would ask you to take away from this call. First, we feel internally at Acxiom but I think you see it in these results that our momentum is building. The second thing is while we have challenges and we’ve talked about some of those challenges on the call today, we firmly believe that the wind is at our back. And then finally, Connectivity remains strong, Audience Solutions is on the upswing and our Marketing Database business is stable. Thank you very much for joining us. It was great having you and we look forward to your follow-up calls. Thanks everyone.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your program. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a great day.