The hunt for a post-LiveRamp successor is already underway

If that deal goes through, plenty of companies want to fill the gap it leaves behind, including the dinner’s host: Hightouch.

“I really believe that the market and the ecosystem need a neutral party, and that’s the position that we’ve been playing in, and now we’re really trying to rise to the occasion with the recent news,” said Tejas Manohar, the company’s co-CEO.

Manohar and everyone else, it seems. The idea that this week, when the gut of the ad industry descends on the south of France for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, is the perfect moment to lay claim to LiveRamp’s old throne as the default independent data connector for audiences wasn’t lost on others.

As soon as Publicis announced the deal last month, pitch decks got shredded and redone, invite lists got redrawn as seating plans got reordered, and new marketing collateral was spun up. All to capitalize on the concern the deal caused.

Or rather, the perceived one.

The ‘neutrality’ misnomer

Neutrality, in this market, has never been a fixed or provable state. No identity vendor sits outside the agency ecosystem entirely. The relationships, ownership stakes and commercial ties run through all of them, LiveRamp included. And any vendor wearing the neutral label today can lose it tomorrow, the moment it gets bought. Chasing the next neutral player just resets the clock.

What’s actually driving the panic isn’t a sudden loss of neutrality. It’s a structural conflict. CMOs don’t want their first-party data flowing through infrastructure owned by a holding company that also runs a competing agency. That’s a narrower, more concrete problem than the “neutral player” framing suggests, and one that doesn’t disappear just by switching vendors.

The bigger miss in the rush to fill LiveRamp’s seat is that identity was never really its moat. The marketplace and the breadth of connections built on top of it were. A clean room or an identity graph without that surrounding infrastructure is closer to storage than to a solution.

Bob Walczak, CEO of MadConnect, told Digiday that, prior to the announcement of Publicis’ intended acquisition, multiple holding company agencies were preparing to let their contracts with LiveRamp lapse — after all, speculation over such a deal had been mounting for months. “The announcement only accelerated their timeline to exit the relationship,” he added.

LiveRamp successors?

One cluster is built around cloud‑native activation layers that keep first‑party data inside the client’s own stack — for the most part, these are built on Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.

Such players are pitching themselves against LiveRamp at a fraction of the cost, as they can perform a competing service without the “data tax” of duplicating and cold‑storing customer files in a third‑party environment. 

Their pitch is thus: as agencies become visible owners of data platforms, large advertisers require data sovereignty, real‑time access, and the ability to switch partners without handing a copy of their crown‑jewel datasets to a future rival.  

Sitting alongside them is a fragmented identity‑graph market: European specialists and email‑based graphs; independent ID providers, such as ID5, etc., seen as potential buy‑side targets; and a long tail of regional bridges and clean-room-style collaboration tools. 

However, with no obvious single‑vendor replacement for LiveRamp’s breadth, the likely outcome is patchwork stacks: agencies combining their in‑house data assets with one or two external graphs and a cloud‑resident collaboration layer, rather than plugging everything into a single neutral hub.  

Ciarán O’Kane, a partner at investment outfit First Party Capital, argues that the Publicis deal will inevitably trigger a wave of strategic mergers and acquisitions as agencies and platforms look for alternatives. He also said he expects multiple specialist players (graphs and onboarding pipes) to be bought by strategics trying to plug gaps in their stacks and retain LiveRamp‑type functionality without being tied to Publicis.  

“There’s like two parts to this: LiveRamp has a graph, and an onboarding piece,” he said, adding how its integrations into all the platforms, billing, etc., is difficult to achieve and maintain, if not the most glamorous part of the media industry (ergo valuable). “There’s not many companies out there doing that, and that’s what LiveRamp offered.”

Building back better

Walczak of MadConnect — a company hotly tipped to make great quarry of the fallout from the anticipated desertion from a Publicis-owned LiveRamp – noted that companies are not just seeking like-for-like replacements, given technological advancements in the sector.

“There’s advancements happening because of the transaction,” he said, noting that whereas most parties simply defaulted to using LiveRamp, more progressive thinkers are reassessing their tech stack. “The shift [from clients] is now, ‘I’m gonna rebuild this the right way, and here’s the way that I need it done…’ This is what will give businesses an edge.”

He told Digiday the post-LiveRamp (as an independent entity) industry will be multiple interoperating players that sit close to media with direct connections and run inside brand/agency clouds, combining identity, connectivity, and activation rather than a single one‑for‑one replacement.

Finding a moat

From most sources, the theory of a potential “post‑LiveRamp land‑grab” centers on owning the pipes into sovereign first‑party data (before someone else does), rather than cloning one incumbent. “We believe it’s very hard, as demonstrated by the reaction of the market to the LiveRamp deal, to stay neutral inside a larger party,” said Bruce Biegel, a senior managing partner at Winterberry Group. “However, if you have the best marketplace, you will still be very successful.”

Indeed, there’s a reason why so many of the conversations sound as if they have whittled down to the idea that connections are the moat. That’s what made LiveRamp so compelling. It was about connecting all those data points and arriving at a match rate with provenance, which could then be used to predict what a CMO’s activation would look like within that platform. Not many other companies can do. It’s why Cadent has kicked up so much chatter this week. Because it buys so much media, its data marketplace and identity spine actually show a CMO what their addressable universe is for audience activation. 

More M&A?

All of this sits atop renewed speculation about subsequent M&A in the space, with idle chatter that vendors such as Cadent, ID5, or MadConnect could be next on the block, taking place at multiple corporate soirées up and down La Croisette this week.

Potential candidates to make such purchases are holding companies that are already behaving like quasi‑walled gardens, stitching together identity, data, and supply under their own brands, while private equity circles independent ID and measurement players as potential roll‑ups.

Whether any of these players will be able to command LiveRamp’s multi-billion-dollar valuation remains uncertain. For O’Kane, it’s not just a matter of finding or offering the right moat. “I would say that in ad tech, two things are key: having very good tech and good timing… sometimes you can have good tech, and you don’t have good timing… But when good timing comes with it, there are ultimately acquisitions,” he concluded.

In short, the real prize isn’t replacing LiveRamp itself but controlling the infrastructure that connects first-party data, identity, and media activation.