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In the months since Publicis Groupe announced its $2.2 billion deal to acquire LiveRamp, CMOs have been considering a crucial question: should I stay, or should I go? That deal closed this week (Monday Nov. 2), bringing the decision to the top of many marketers’ to-do lists.
To recap, clients and their agencies use LiveRamp to onboard their first party data and match it against a large dataset of audience profiles for media targeting and measurement. LiveRamp’s alternative ID solution, RampID, is one of the most commonly used by the market.
But the company’s acquisition by Publicis has prompted questions about the neutrality of this critical digital media infrastructure — and has brought older arguments over the usage of identity solutions back to the fore.
“It’s brought a lot more focus in the industry, both on the client side and certainly in agency land, on the importance and value of these foundational components,” said Jonathan Margulies, managing partner at Winterberry Group.
Here’s the case for and against clients sticking or twisting with LiveRamp.
The case for staying
Upon the deal’s closure, Publicis released a video in which CEO Arthur Sadoun and chief strategy officer Carla Serrano spent six minutes laying out Publicis’ LiveRamp pitch — and attempting to defuse concerns over neutrality and independence of the adtech company’s services.
For Sadoun and Serrano, the pairing’s chief benefit to clients was its “plug and play” nature — the idea that, in using LiveRamp and Epsilon, either as a client of the broader Publicis constellation or not, clients can save upfront investment and act faster. “Clients are trapped between two bad options: surrender their data to the walled gardens for easy scale and lose control, or hire an army of consultants and lose time and a lot of money,” said Sadoun.
Clients that do decide to unplug LiveRamp from their marketing stack will find the search for a new partner an expensive and time-consuming process. LiveRamp is considered to be a market leader, with a huge dataset owing to its larger customer base and partnership deals with commerce networks.
Combining its capabilities with Epsilon makes its position even stronger. Given the IAB projects commerce media spending to grow 13.6% this year, making it the third-fastest growing area of advertising investment after social media and CTV — those capabilities, which are used on the supply-side by the likes of Walmart, Target, Albertsons and Kroger may become more important to CMOs in coming years. LiveRamp is also well-positioned for advertisers hoping to move early into emerging channels like ChatGPT; the firm became OpenAI’s first conversion API partner in June.
For many clients, those arguments will outweigh neutrality worries expressed by Publicis’ holdco rivals (which aren’t, in any case, united in their opposition. Havas, for example, seems set to continue using LiveRamp’s tech in its flagship Converged data platform in North America.)
Furthermore advertisers can now rely upon FTC-enforced rules of the road. Publicis is required to maintain access to LiveRamp by competitors, to set up firewalls to ensure it doesn’t access customer data or confidential business information, and to permit an independent auditor to probe its compliance every six months for two years, and then annually for three years (it doesn’t, however, prohibit the firm from developing integrated products that bridge LiveRamp and its other business units). “It will stay open to every brand, every platform, and yes, every agency,” said Serrano.
While it’s unusual to find companies that commonly spar over new business pitches clients of each other, not every holdco chief is queasy about the prospect. Yannick Bolloré, CEO of Havas, said earlier this year he expected his group to stick with LiveRamp.
“We’re clients of Publicis now,” he told Adweek in July. “We still work with them. Our strategy is to partner with the best data company to offer the right data sets for clients, whether it is LiveRamp, or Epsilon, or Acxiom, or Kantar, or whatever.” If Bolloré can put up with it, can’t you?
The case for leaving
Publicis’ ambitions for LiveRamp are tied up in earlier investments in companies like Lotame, Epsilon and Sapient, through which it wants to position itself as a one-stop shop for the entire media investment process. For advertisers already working with its agencies the addition of LiveRamp into the mix is a plus. But for clients that don’t work with Publicis, the neutral status of firms like LiveRamp isn’t a minor issue.
Some CMOs are actively looking for an alternative destination. As Benoit Vatere, chief media officer at Liquid Death, put it in a Monday Linkedin post: “Who in their right mind will let a holdco own your data and graph. Do you really think we are that stupid?”
Agency discomfort over their rivals owning critical infrastructure is more than just a feeling. In 2018 IPG acquired Axciom’s marketing services business, leaving its identity resolution business — LiveRamp — as a separate entity, its independence preserved. Publicis’s 2026 deal has prompted its peers WPP and Omnicom to back off using the platform because they feel that independence has been compromised.
“I don’t see there is any way that you can get any value keeping LiveRamp independent of the rest of your infrastructure,” said John Wren, the CEO of Omnicom, back in May. Stagwell CEO Mark Penn has made similar noises. “They don’t want to indirectly provide a competitive advantage to one of their direct [rivals],” said Margulies.
For clients operating outside the United States, the downside is even larger. 95% of LiveRamp’s $800 million annual revenue comes from the U.S. market. The United States accounts for a huge proportion of digital ad spending, but brands also operating across international borders and regulatory domains might consider the neutrality problem too large a bugbear to bother with, given LiveRamp’s limited application elsewhere.
Their withdrawal could, in turn, impact advertisers that don’t work with the big three “operating companies”. If WPP and Omnicom’s client data is no longer present in LiveRamp’s dataset, then its reservoir shrinks – and its ability to link another advertiser’s first party information to the wider market is diminished.
Although Sadoun told analysts during Publicis’ recent earnings call he was unworried by the policy change, Apple’s recent crackdown on identity resolution has highlighted the limitations of relying on deterministic means of targeting audiences.
For those that want them, alternatives are in the offing. Last week WPP boss Cindy Rose was keen to highlight how its data collaboration platform InfoSum offered a means of patching proprietary data and consumer data secure from the meddling of Califoria tech giants — while Omnicom’s Axciom unit has been developing its own identity solution, Real ID, as a replacement for LiveRamp.
Media buyers have gradually begun relying less on third-party audience data in recent years. According to a OpenX study published earlier this year, 40% supply-side-targeted CTV deal spend processed through its platform in 2025 involved third party targeting data, down from 78% three years earlier. Contextual targeting and vector-based solutions have become more popular among brands like Heineken for targeting on the web or on CTV, while fewer advertisers rely outright on first-party data.
“This is driving brands and their partners to do a lot of soul searching of exactly what their strategy is going to be vis-a-vis data,” said Margulies.
In basic terms, more advertisers are embracing a probabilistic, intent-driven approach to addressable media. Such approaches have less need for the identity resolution solutions offered by LiveRamp. When added to neutrality or privacy concerns like Vatere’s, this shift makes it easy for advertisers to step away.
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