LiveRamp began trading as $RAMP on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday and hosted investors and analysts when the company reintroduced itself to the market following the sale of Acxiom Marketing Solutions to IPG for $2.3 billion in July. LiveRamp is embracing its position as a subscription-based middleware technology, a category that comes with […]
With $2.3 billion in cash on the books thanks to IPG’s acquisition of Acxiom Marketing Solutions in July, the newly constituted LiveRamp is ready to start bankrolling its road map in a serious way. “We didn’t have the technology muscle before and we weren’t investing in R&D,” said Scott Howe, who went from CEO and […]
This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. When Anneka Gupta joined LiveRamp as her first job out of college, she didn’t foresee that she’d be co-CEO seven years later. In fact, she didn’t even know if she wanted to be a […]
AppNexus’s new telco owner, AT&T, has withdrawn it from the Advertising ID Consortium, a shared industry cookie ID it co-founded last year, along with other independent ad tech platforms. Adweek first reported the move on Thursday. Does the withdrawal spell curtains for the independent identity graph before it really got off the ground? The consortium […]
Development of the Advertising ID Consortium, a shared cookie-based ID service for programmatic companies, has stalled as two of the key backers, AppNexus and LiveRamp, undertake protracted M&A processes. The consortium is still moving forward, according to sources with knowledge of the nonprofit group’s product development, but the already complicated politics of ‘co-opetition’ are exacerbated […]
Drawbridge is one of the cross-device OGs, but it’s in the midst of a pivot. The company revealed $15 million in new financing on Monday from existing investors Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Northgate. The money, which brings Drawbridge’s total funding to $70 million, will be immediately invested into a product road map focused on non-advertising-related […]
Acxiom had a solid quarter – although it would have been a bit more solid if it still had its Facebook relationship. On Thursday, the company reported earnings for its fiscal quarter ending June 30, with total revenue clocking in at $227 million, up 7% year over year. If Partner Categories, Facebook’s now-retired feature for third-party […]
This is a new podcast from AdExchanger. It will be available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about, well, the biggest stories that broke over the past week. In our inaugural episode, Managing Editor Ryan Joe and staff writers Alison Weissbrot […]
When IPG acquired Acxiom’s managed services group, Marketing Solutions (AMS), for $2.3 billion last week, it marked the end of a five- months-long strategic review of the business – and the start of the next big sales review process with LiveRamp. Acxiom already had opened a strategic review of LiveRamp but was intent on selling […]
Looks like Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) is an agency business after all. Interpublic Group said Monday it acquired Acxiom’s legacy data management business for $2.3 billion. AMS represents about three-quarters of Acxiom’s total revenue. Dennis Self and Rick Erwin will serve as co-presidents of AMS, which will remain a standalone unit aligned with IPG Mediabrands. […]
Data matching and cookie syncing aren’t verboten under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but getting the consent to do it is another story altogether, since consumers need to know exactly what they’re signing up for when they provide unambiguous and specific consent. Like most vendors in the ad tech ecosystem, companies that onboard data […]
Acxiom intends to sell its marketing solutions division before moving to a potential sale of LiveRamp, because it believes selling them separately will drive more shareholder value, said sources close to the company. Interest in Acxiom and LiveRamp in particular heated up in March, after Salesforce bought the middleware tech company MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Onboarder Offloaded? Acxiom is shopping LiveRamp, a linchpin of data-driven advertising, Mike Shields reports for Business Insider. LiveRamp, the strongest player in the data-onboarder category, would have many suitors, with marketing tech giants like Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and IBM likely to make a bid. […]
LiveRamp has acquired B2B audience marketplace Pacific Data Partners to boost its B2B data footprint, the company said Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company’s co-founders, Pieter De Temmerman and Grant Ries, both formerly of BlueKai and Oracle Data Cloud, will join LiveRamp to expand its IdentityLink business and its B2B data […]
Acxiom stock ticked up Tuesday despite missing revenue estimates and lowering revenue guidance. A likely reason: The company announced a strategic review of its Marketing Services business and some of its Audience Solutions assets to consider a potential sale, merger, spin-off or other exit. CEO Scott Howe told investors the plan is to consolidate Acxiom’s […]
A number of ad tech-backed coalitions consolidating cookie pools have bubbled up this year to stave off Google, Facebook and Amazon running away with the market with their own scaled identity assets. And trends like Safari’s ITP cookie restrictions shift the advantage further toward the walled gardens with daily active users. AdExchanger looked at a […]
Remember that consortium led by LiveRamp, MediaMath and AppNexus to develop a cookie-based identifier that could be used consistently across the open exchange? While live tests are still set for October, ad tech vendors are hesitant to buy in due to LiveRamp’s exclusive role as a cross-device option. MediaMath is already out, said John Slocum, […]
Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. After graduating Stanford in 2010 with a degree in math and computational sciences, Anneka Gupta took her first software engineering job with a company called Rapleaf. That was seven years ago, and she’s still there – though the company and its positioning have changed utterly. […]
IBM-owned pub The Weather Co. is working to tap into people-based marketing budgets that would normally go to Facebook or Google by using LiveRamp’s IdentityLink product. Marketers and publishers alike onboard their data to LiveRamp’s huge online identity graph to kick off the process. Because LiveRamp can identify many more users than a marketer or […]
Seven independent ad tech companies debuted a programmatic consortium on Thursday that pools their supply- and demand-side cookie IDs into one shared identity asset. The consortium is helmed by AppNexus, MediaMath and LiveRamp, which provides the data matching. Other launch partners include Index Exchange, Rocket Fuel, LiveIntent and OpenX. And it’s a shot across the […]
Data management is like dental hygiene: No one enjoys doing it or even thinking about it, but you’ve got to stay on top of it or else the situation will get really messy really quickly. Joanna O’Connell, CMO of MediaMath, on Thursday moderated a panel about data management that felt like a good cleanse. […]
Digital ad players from AOL to Facebook have given lead-gen ads a try, but one company built an entire business around it. Fluent has remained relatively quiet since it was acquired by information services company IDI, now Cogint, for $100 million in cash. The company was on a $140 million (gross revenue) run rate at […]
TV buyers are used to transacting on GRPs and Nielsen ratings, while digital buyers purchase targeted impressions. That has complicated the way advertisers plan, buy and measure their emerging cross-screen campaigns. Several companies have built tools to address the problem, but many have sold brand-direct or by way of the trading desk. RTL Group–backed VideoAmp […]
LiveRamp will drop $140 million to finance its people-based marketing dreams. On Thursday, the Acxiom-owned onboarding company announced its intention to acquire two companies: Arbor, a marketplace for people-based data, and Circulate, which helps app developers monetize their first-party data in a privacy-friendly way. LiveRamp declined to say how much it paid for each company. […]
Casino gaming and hotel giant Caesars Entertainment is ramping up its people-based marketing efforts, and it’s tapping Acxiom-owned data onboarder LiveRamp for identity resolution. “There are a lot of data partners out there for first-party data, for second-party data, for third-party data,” said Dwight Pirtle, internet marketing manager at Caesars. “But we’re looking to identify […]
People-based marketing is the natural evolution of data onboarding, according to LiveRamp, the data onboarder owned by Acxiom. On Wednesday, LiveRamp launched IdentityLink, which aims to resolve a single identity across different online and offline touch points. It’s an extension of what LiveRamp already does, said CEO Travis May. LiveRamp’s bread and butter has always been […]
Cross-device identity match rates have shot up in recent years, but brands and agencies remain skeptical of the results. “We were consistently disappointed with cross-device identity matches,” said David Kohl, CEO of the digital media advisory firm Morgan Digital Ventures. “There’s a gap in understanding of what’s possible between vendors and the buy side, [which […]
In an unusual partnership between agency and onboarder, DigitasLBi has teamed up with LiveRamp to sharpen and speed up the segmentation capabilities of its advanced analytics platform to drive more targeted campaigns. DigitasLBi said Thursday that it will leverage LiveRamp’s data connectivity services on IDIOM, its advanced analytics platform – still in the process of […]
Call it the holistic grail: the ability to connect advertising, ecommerce activity and in-store buying with a single measurement. No one’s filled that gap yet, but a bunch of companies are taking incremental steps. Earlier this month the location analytics shop Placed added a product for attributing in-store lift to its suite. Then last week […]
A couple of partnerships have popped out of RampUp, a Tuesday conference centered around Acxiom’s data onboarding service, which has since been integrated into a unit called Connectivity. The common theme – probably not surprisingly – is the ability to do one-to-one matching. Adobe Audience Manager: From Device Matching To Individual/Household Matching First, Adobe and […]
