Why marketers are rethinking identity infrastructure

The first and most obvious question is whether LiveRamp will stay neutral. It’s a reasonable thing to wonder. It’s also, according to several ad execs, largely an agency concern dressed up as a marketer one.

Neutrality was always fragile

For them, the service is the service. Who owns the infrastructure matters less than whether it keeps working. The neutrality anxiety sits higher up the chain, with the agencies that compete against Publicis for business and have spent years routing their clients’ first-party data through a platform that now sits inside a rival’s house. There, the fear isn’t that Publicis will raid the data. It’s that a competitor now owns the infrastructure they’ve spent years depending on.

Ron Amram, an industry consultant who previously held leadership roles in in-house media teams at companies including Heineken and Mars, said the acquisition effectively crystallizes a debate the industry has been circling around for years: whether a truly “neutral middle” in advertising technology still exists at all. “There’s been a lot of talk about the neutral middle,” he told Digiday, adding that the $2.2 proposed purchase of LiveRamp by Publicis underlines the question, “Does it exist anymore?”

Amram argued the acquisition accelerates Publicis’ efforts to position itself not simply as an agency holding company, but as a data and infrastructure partner to clients — something rivals have long discussed but struggled to fully execute.

“I think the LiveRamp acquisition moves them [Publicis] in a direction that the holding companies have been talking about for a very long time, and struggled with, which is being data managers and data companies for their clients,” he said.

However, Amram suggested the transaction raises difficult questions for clients across all holding companies, including Publicis itself. Marketers now have to scrutinize more closely whether the tools and data infrastructure they rely on are genuinely the best fit for their needs, or increasingly shaped by ownership structures and internal incentives.

“The problem is the messy middle [of ad tech] is now gone,” he said, adding that the latest $2.2 billion deal underlines questions that have been raised for years, i.e., marketers will have to query their agencies’ motives to recommend particular services. “You need to look a level deeper than you used to, because there’s nobody double-checking, verifying independently, and that’s the issue.”

“Some marketers we’ve spoken to are surveying their options, but there are many more asking how they should be thinking about this,” said Doug Rozen, president of Cadent.

The honest answer is that moving quickly isn’t really an option. Several alternatives that might have filled the gap now sit within the Publicis stack. And even for those who’ve identified where they want to go, the privacy contracts governing first-party data onboarding take months to negotiate.

“We’ve talked to a few brands about it, and those have been just very high-level POV,” said Chance Johnson, chief commercial officer at Nexxen.

The cost of replacing the pipes

The alternatives that do exist are real but limited. Clean rooms — Snowflake being the most cited in these conversations — have seen a spike in interest. But a clean room is not the solution here. LiveRamp didn’t just provide a safe container for data; it provided the matching depth that made data actionable at scale. Without it, the problem doesn’t get simpler. It gets harder.

The reason: LiveRamp’s RampID ran through everything simultaneously — a persistent thread connecting brands, agencies, platforms, and publishers that had built their own proprietary graphs alongside it. It was the one consistent identifier that the industry, for all its fragmentation, could trade off. What fills that void is more fragmentation, proprietary alternatives that can solve part of the problem, for part of the ecosystem, at a fraction of the scale.

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Jeremy Hlavacek, an industry consultant with extensive experience working with LiveRamp across multiple roles, said the deal is forcing brands to confront a broader strategic question, nominally: who ultimately controls the infrastructure layer of digital advertising?

According to Hlavacek, Publicis is simply moving more aggressively than most of its rivals toward becoming a full-scale data and technology platform for marketers — even as other holding companies pursue similar strategies through their own acquisitions and partnerships. Publicis might be the most aggressive or the boldest with this strategy, and I’m sure that that’s helping them win client business,” he said.

Still, Hlavacek cautioned that disentangling from LiveRamp is far easier said than done. The company’s identity and onboarding infrastructure are deeply embedded across measurement systems, audience workflows, and platform integrations throughout the industry. “LiveRamp is the Walmart of data, or Amazon for that matter. They have everything, right?” he said.

However, this leaves marketers in an uncomfortable position. Even if some brands ultimately decide they want to reduce exposure to infrastructure controlled by agency holding companies, the operational complexity of doing so could take years.

Regardless, Hlavacek described the acquisition as a catalyst likely to force advertisers, agencies, and platforms alike to reassess their longer-term data strategies and dependencies. “This is a spark for change, right?” he said, adding, “I’m sure there are going to be agencies, advertisers, platforms that all kind of reconsider their strategy around LiveRamp.”

From neutrality to control

Some marketers are starting to accept that and work with it rather than against it. The infrastructure layer was always going to end up owned by someone. The smarter play, the argument goes, isn’t to find the neutral version of the same thing. It’s to build something they control well enough that neutrality stops being the question.

That’s the conclusion Bob Walczak at MadConnect has reached. Rather than finding a new centralized platform to route data through, the brands he’s advising are moving toward architectures where the data doesn’t move at all — deployed, in-environment solutions where processing happens inside their own walls. “The solution needs to be deployed into the client’s environment so there’s zero transfer of data, and everything stays within the walls until they decide to make a connection,” he told Digiday.

According to multiple sources approached by Digiday, the most apparent solution was to own the architecture; then the neutrality question answers itself.

Rozen at Cadent took it a step further. Neutrality, he argued, was never the right bar to begin with. “Neutrality is table stakes — you promise neutrality when transparency doesn’t exist,” he added. “The real test is when advertisers can actually see how their audiences are being built, how their identity is being resolved, where their data flows.”

Whoever can offer that, he continued, wins the next phase regardless of who owns LiveRamp.

These aren’t new concerns. Versions of this conversation have surfaced before — around agency trading desks, around the General Data Protection Regulation, and around the death of the third-party cookie. Each time, they triggered activity in fits and starts rather than the wholesale rethink they seemed to demand. This time may be different.

AI raises the stakes in a way previous disruptions didn’t. A trading desk or a privacy regulation changes how marketers buy media. AI changes what their data is actually worth — and whose systems become smarter because of it. “Your LLM is only as powerful as the data that feeds it,” as Nexxen’s Johnson told Digiday.

Marketers who haven’t thought carefully about where their data lives, how it’s processed, and whose models it’s sharpening are likely to find that out the hard way.