LiveRamp continued a run of strong growth when it reported earnings on Thursday.
The company returned to Q4 profitability with a net income of $14 million, up from a $30 million loss in 2022.
Scott Howe, LiveRamp’s CEO, attributes success in the quarter to cloud-based integrations and an improved macroeconomic environment with clients.
But LiveRamp is also experiencing a moment of great change – for itself and the industry.
The cloud
LiveRamp has always been a facilitator, a data platform that plugs into your tech stack. Nowadays, that means being a cloud-jumping service provider.
Earlier in LiveRamp’s history (but also not so long ago), the company won the vast majority of new clients through its mar tech integration partners, Howe told AdExchanger prior to the earnings report.
“At the time, it was the CRM and DMPs, such as Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle,” he said. Then customer data platforms joined the list.
Now, though, LiveRamp is all about its cloud-based channel partners: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Snowflake.
LiveRamp’s partnership with Snowflake alone has brought it more than 100 new client engagements, according to Howe.
All of the cloud operators, including Snowflake, understand that data collaboration isn’t tied to the infrastructure provider. Companies aren’t going to make their decisions about data collaboration partners based on which cloud infrastructure they use. Companies built on AWS, for instance, will also need to work with others on Snowflake, GCP and Microsoft Azure, etcetera.
LiveRamp itself is built on GCP, but ties into the other clouds wherever it can.
Which explains why LiveRamp acquired data collaboration startup Habu last month for $200 million. As a cross-cloud clean room specialist, Howe said, Habu brings experience with cloud operators like Databricks and Microsoft Azure into LiveRamps’s product as well.
The cookie
The other inflection point change for LiveRamp is the same as for the rest of digital media: third-party cookie deprecation.
But unlike many other voices on cookie deprecation, LiveRamp is eager for this to happen already.
Howe said publishers and advertisers shouldn’t wait for Google to make its move. He advises that the ecosystem stop using third-party cookies right now, even while they’re available.
“By early summer, cookies will be unusable,” Howe told AdExchanger.
He pointed to LiveRamp’s case study for the Google PAIR advertising product, which allows Google’s DSP to bid on deterministic traffic minus cookies with the help of data matching partners on the supply side. (LiveRamp, Habu and Infosum were the three vendor options, which was collapsed down to two after LiveRamp’s Habu deal.)
As Chrome deprecates cookies throughout this year, he said their utility will decrease and the value of cookieless media should improve as advertisers reevaluate their campaign strategies. Only 1% of Chrome users are cookie-free right now – but once that gets to half, the game is up.
It’s unclear, however, exactly how and when Chrome will manage the cookie deprecation phaseout.
Danny Rojas, Google’s strategic partner development manager for Chrome and Web platforms, said at an event hosted by RTB House in New York City this week that the Chrome team hasn’t settled on a plan for when or even how to reach 100% deprecation. For instance, will they expand deprecation in cohorts over the course of this year – from 1% cookieless to 35%, then 70%, before the full rollout – or simply shrink the lifespan of a third-party cookie from, say, two weeks to one week, to three days, to one day, and then poof!
It makes sense for Google to be quiet and cautious about the topic, Howe said. Google has the UK’s CMA to deal with, not just vendors, and regulatory scrutiny slows down the decision-making process.
Regardless, he said, Google’s more immediate priority should be to educate the industry and evangelize the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, as well as Google ad products like PAIR that use consent signals but don’t involve third-party cookies.
“You’ll see them be more vocal about this change and how quickly it’s coming,” Howe said.
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