Ad Tech Briefing: The crunch conversations at Cannes Lions now Publicis is buying LiveRamp

But beneath the initial handwringing, more consequential questions are being asked. From here, agencies, marketers and ad tech vendors alike have to reassess who should control the infrastructure underpinning audience targeting, measurement and data collaboration.

According to some, the acquisition has just accelerated conversations that were already underway, with many expecting them to be key items of crunch conversations at this month’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

A new reality for agencies 

Intuitively, for most agency holding companies, the most immediate concern is conflict of interest.

For years, LiveRamp positioned itself as a neutral connective layer, helping brands, publishers, agencies and technology vendors match and activate data across fragmented advertising ecosystems. Once that infrastructure sits inside Publicis, competitors are inevitably questioning how comfortable they can remain routing sensitive client data and activation workflows through a platform owned by a direct rival.

However, that doesn’t mean agencies will immediately sever ties, given how deeply embedded LiveRamp is in the industry.

The reality for those in this camp is that LiveRamp is so deeply into their daily campaign workflows that any subsequent transition is costly and operationally complex. But multiple sources telling Digiday rival holding groups are evaluating their exposure to LiveRamp and what alternative architectures might look like, should they choose to reduce that dependency.

In fact, sources claim that many agencies are already pursuing broader productization strategies in curation, audience activation and proprietary media products, with subsequent mergers and acquisitions from rival holding companies expected by many.

Regardless, rather than relying on dozens of specialist vendors, spending has increasingly concentrated around a smaller group of strategic partners capable of powering those efforts at scale. 

The combination of Publicis and LiveRamp will likely encourage agencies to either deepen relationships with a handful of trusted alternatives or accelerate the development of their own identity, clean-room, and collaboration capabilities.

No obvious replacement

However, a key consideration is that replacing LiveRamp is rarely a one-for-one exercise. One theme emerging from agency discussions is that the future may involve assembling an identity stack rather than purchasing one.

Several holding companies are understood to be evaluating combinations of identity providers, clean-room technologies, cloud infrastructure, and collaboration tools to enable them to control more of the underlying logic themselves.

The problem is that LiveRamp’s value has never been confined to identity resolution alone. Its strength stems from years of integrations across advertisers, publishers, platforms and measurement partners. That ecosystem connectivity created a level of interoperability that is difficult to replicate quickly, even for well-funded competitors.

As a result, many agencies are discovering that reducing dependence on LiveRamp may be strategically desirable — but deeply challenging in practice.

Marketers focus on ‘data sovereignty’ 

Meanwhile, if agencies are focused on neutrality, marketers appear increasingly focused on control, according to Digiday sources.

The acquisition has heightened existing conversations around data sovereignty and the extent to which brands should entrust their most valuable first-party data assets to external intermediaries.

Many marketers have spent the past several years investing heavily in cloud infrastructure, customer data platforms and first-party data strategies. The long-term objective has been to retain ownership of customer information while selectively enabling collaboration and activation.

Against that backdrop, the Publicis-LiveRamp deal serves as a reminder that infrastructure providers can change ownership, strategic priorities and competitive alignments.

Some marketers are expected to continue working with LiveRamp while ring-fencing certain use cases. Others may shift high-value activities such as identity stitching, measurement, or publisher collaboration toward vendors perceived as more independent.

If a supposedly neutral infrastructure layer can become part of a competing agency group overnight, marketers are likely to place a greater premium on portability, flexibility and avoiding unnecessary dependencies.

An opening for challengers?

For smaller identity and data collaboration companies, the acquisition has created a rare opportunity.

Vendors such as ID5 and Audiences are already being discussed more frequently in agency and advertiser conversations as buyers assess alternatives.

However, this does not guarantee meaningful market share gains. The identity market remains heavily concentrated, and large incumbents benefit from scale, integrations, and entrenched workflows. Still, the deal has created something challengers rarely receive: a compelling reason for buyers to revisit decisions they may have considered settled.

The larger opportunity may lie in how those challengers position themselves.

Rather than replicating LiveRamp’s centralized model, many are betting on cloud-native, modular architectures that allow brands and agencies to retain greater control over their own data environments while leveraging external partners for specific functions.

What appears clearer is that Publicis’ acquisition of LiveRamp is becoming about far more than one company buying another. It is forcing the market to revisit a structural quandary that has lingered beneath advertising’s identity debates for years, i.e., who should own the infrastructure that powers modern marketing?

The result of these conversations, later this month at La Croisette, Cannes – either that, or on a yacht somewhere off its coastline – will decide the next phase of competition across agencies, ad tech, and data collaboration long after the deal itself closes.

What we heard

“The contextual ad firm will gain new brand safety capabilities in the walled gardens of Meta and Google, enabling it to take on DoubleVerify and IAS.”

—Dr. Augustine Fou congratulates Peer39 on its purchase of content verification upstart Adloox from Scope3.

Numbers to know

Recent Jounce Media report findings:

• 29.5: The average number of RTB-enabled supply partners a publisher monetizes.
• 41%: The percentage of display ad auctions generated by “rebroadcasting.” 
• 11%: The amount of web bid requests that lead to a desktop app, not a website.

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