Hundreds of exasperated and unexpected ad industry phone calls were made on Sunday, as agencies and ad tech vendors discussed the fallout of Publicis Groupe’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp over the weekend.
Publicis has roughly doubled its market cap over the past four years, as other agency holdcos and ad tech businesses have struggled. Its acquisition spree of tech and data companies, including data collaboration and identity graph startup Lotame a year ago, is a main reason often given by investors for Publicis’s success.
And LiveRamp is a relative bargain. It comes at half the price of Publicis’ deal for Epsilon in 2019.
But the headline here isn’t the deal price. The fact that LiveRamp will no longer be independent has major consequences for other agencies and the ad tech ecosystem overall, where LiveRamp’s RampID is the most common shared currency.
LiveRamp doesn’t have a massive customer base. Just 846 direct customers – brands, retailers, media sellers and data owners – subscribe to LiveRamp’s software package, the company disclosed on Sunday when it released its full-year 2026 earnings materials early alongside the acquisition news. That number is actually down from more than 900 customers as of late 2024.
LiveRamp is quite expensive, and thus has a customer base of mostly large enterprises. However, the real value for Publicis likely comes from LiveRamp’s port-of-call status for the ad tech and mar tech ecosystems.
One data and analytics leader at a rival holdco, upon hearing the LiveRamp acquisition news, jested to AdExchanger that the deal would allow the agency group to slip out of what had become a too-costly contract with LiveRamp. Although, they added, speaking anonymously so as to be able to discuss their agency’s ongoing deals, this holdco is participating in multiple RFPs right now where it and other agencies are being tested based on performance – and that performance is measured by RampID.
What we need to learn
More than any of Publicis’ previous ad tech and mar tech acquisitions, LiveRamp leaves us with many open questions.
What, for example, does Publicis really want to do with LiveRamp?
Most of the attention goes to AI and the ostensibly agentic future.
“LiveRamp fits perfectly into the architecture of our model, delivering more intelligent agents to accelerate our clients’ agentic business transformation,” Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun said while announcing the deal.
Which is all well and good, but it buries the lede. The most important word uttered by Sadoun during his announcement was actually “interoperable,” which he only said once during the impromptu call because, as he jokingly noted, he struggles with the English pronunciation of the word.
LiveRamp sits at the very heart of programmatic interoperability. When ad tech, marketing and data vendors discuss interoperability, which happens a lot, LiveRamp is often what they mean. And just like with agencies, when ad tech vendors have bakeoffs against one another, the LiveRamp RampID is often used as the taste-tester, so to speak, of those results.
With this in mind, the question becomes: Can Publicis maintain that interoperability? And, by the flip side of the same coin, will the market recognize LiveRamp as being independent?
If a brand is testing new agencies or ad tech vendors, for instance, it must decide whether to trust LiveRamp’s RampID to be the arbiter of those results.
Another open question is what Publicis will actually do with LiveRamp.
Might LiveRamp, for instance, offer a cheaper, more accessible level of its software, opening it up to more mid-level brand clients and types of partners beyond Fortune 500 companies?
One of the big value propositions with Publicis’ former ad tech deals, such as with Lotame or Epsilon’s Conversant SSP, is that those products became built-in parts of the Publicis offering. In other words, Lotame and Citrus don’t need to focus so much on going out and winning new customer logos, because the whole point is that they’re baked in.
Publicis could easily double or triple the number of advertisers that LiveRamp works with. But, on the other hand, and unlike with Lotame or Citrus, the whole point of LiveRamp for many of its key partners and clients is its independence. LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe has consistently used the analogy of “Switzerland” to describe LiveRamp as a neutral place where multiple high-friction players can come to resolve disputes – which is to say, campaign resolution.
For many players in the category, Publicis acquiring LiveRamp is less like a star player changing jerseys than the ref itself joining one of the teams.
Meanwhile, other holdco agencies have pulled back wherever they can when it comes to working with Publicis businesses, such as Citrus, Epsilon and Conversant. This dynamic is at odds with LiveRamp’s Switzerland positioning.
“We want every major platform and agency to use our modular composable platform,” Howe said during LiveRamp’s last earnings report in February.
LiveRamp may still want every agency to use its software, but other agencies will probably change their tune.
The independent collaboration category has gotten a lot less independent as of late. A couple of years ago, there was a three-headed race in the category between LiveRamp, Habu and InfoSum. But LiveRamp acquired Habu in 2024, and then there were two. When WPP took over InfoSum last year, it left LiveRamp as the last indie player running in the race.
Does another vendor like Snowflake step in to fill that vacuum? Does the ad industry even need an independent data collaboration platform, or should agencies and major platforms have that capability for and within themselves?
All good questions that the industry will have to answer for itself.
