LiveRamp has acquired the consent management platform (CMP) Faktor, the company said Thursday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But LiveRamp will take on Faktor’s 11-person team in Amsterdam.
Faktor was founded in 2017, in the run-up to the European Union’s implementation of GDPR, when publishers reevaluated their data collection and privacy policies. LiveRamp will make the business a “center of excellence” for privacy technology as data regulations are taken up around the world, like the California Consumer Privacy Act, which goes into effect next year, said Anneka Gupta, president and head of products and platforms.
“I have had so many conversations with brands and publishers where they feel woefully underprepared for what’s coming,” she said, adding that they want LiveRamp to offer data privacy services.
It will be a busy first year for the Faktor technology within LiveRamp. Gupta said she expects a similar “scramble” among US global tech companies later this year, before California state regulators start enforcing the CCPA in January, like what happened in Europe with GDPR.
Faktor’s CMP tech collects GDPR-compliant consent and passes it to ad tech companies, but it will eventually expand beyond that scope. Smart TV manufacturers and connected TV inventory companies will also need consent solutions as privacy regulations expand.
LiveRamp’s identity graph can give Faktor the ability to manage omnichannel consent, Gupta said. For instance, by connecting someone’s work laptop or phone to a home address and Wi-Fi network, LiveRamp could help a publisher recognize readers on different screens, so subscribers won’t have to constantly log-in to their accounts.
And on the demand side, brands are investing heavily in first-party data operations. A US hotel company doesn’t sell media inventory, but it still needs consent and data privacy solutions.
Gupta said LiveRamp’s vision is to “enable any of our partners to be compliant at the click of a button.”
