Publicis buys LiveRamp for federated future

John Ebbert

Publicis buys LiveRamp

Welcome to the new Publicis stack:

  • Epsilon = proprietary identity + data assets
  • LiveRamp = interoperability + connectivity
  • Agents/workflows = operational AI layer
  • Services = monetization + execution

On Sunday, agency holding company Publicis Groupe announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire data collaboration platform LiveRamp for $2.2 billion.

Publicis framed the acquisition price as “$38.50/share, $2.167B enterprise value, $2.546B equity value, and a 29.8% premium to LiveRamp’s May 15 closing share price.”

LiveRamp’s market cap hovered at $1.87 billion on Friday. Publicis was valued at $28.8 billion. A conference call was held earlier today.

This acquisition is the agency holding company’s ‘line in the sand’ against the growing power of walled gardens, whose closed-loop systems increasingly compress the role of intermediaries.

Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun told Adweek yesterday, “Where we truly need LiveRamp is to win a fair share of this agentic transformation market. This is where we are making a big shift.” Read more. (May 17)

From Publicis’ press release:

With LiveRamp, Publicis will become a leader in data co-creation, an important capability in the age of artificial intelligence and an enabler of agentic business transformation.

With this acquisition, for a total enterprise value of $2.2 billion, the Groupe furthers its investment in technology, data, and AI-services to unlock new opportunities for the agentic era. In doing so it will  expand its addressable market, allowing it to raise its 2027-2028 objectives on net revenue and headline EPS growth at constant currency.

Read: Publicis to acquire LiveRamp to accelerate data co-creation for smarter agents (May 17) – Publicis Groupe

Data co-creation

In an 11-minute YouTube video published Sunday, Sadoun and Chief Strategy Officer Carla Serrano make the case for becoming a leader in “data co-creation.”

Serrano defined the phrase:

“Data co-creation is the process by which companies connect multiple, high-value data sources across partners in a secure environment.

It generates new data assets that companies could not build alone and sets the foundation for building more intelligent agents for clients. This is a valuable capability for clients in today’s world.

(…)

The problem with agentic development isn’t the AI itself. It’s the data foundation. The fundamental issue is that the agents that companies are building today do not have the data required to compete and grow their business.”

Publicis’ Epsilon will deliver identity services in coordination with LiveRamp, said Serrano. And for clients, she offered three main benefits which are also covered in the release:

  • “Greater Speed, Security & Scale”
  • “Generate Proprietary Intelligence”
  • “Continuously Train & Fuel AI Models”

View: “Publicis to acquire LiveRamp “ (May 17) – YouTube

Sadoun said that LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe will continue to run LiveRamp for the foreseeable future. He said in part on LinkedIn yesterday, “This transaction is a natural next step in that relationship and will enable LiveRamp and Publicis to deliver truly end-to-end business transformation for our customers and partners. I’m proud of what the LiveRamp team has built over the years and can’t wait to see what comes next.” Read more. (May 17)

From tipsheet: This deal is, in part, a statement by Publicis about the value of data in the age of AI. It also speaks to a federated, interoperable future the holding company believes agents will help unlock.

At its core, Publicis works for the client and it needs to create leverage in a world increasingly dominated by walled gardens. Distributing ad budgets through data-enabled agents — alongside Publicis agency services — is the way forward, according to the holding company.

Meanwhile, LiveRamp, long positioned as connective tissue across the ecosystem, is now aligning with one holding company in particular.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

  • Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shakeup (May 15) – Wired (subscription)
  • Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said his company will likely spend $300M on Anthropic tokens (May 15) – Business Insider (subscription)
  • Six Months of Meta Ray-Ban Display (May 14) – Meta

AGENCIES

Reaction: Publicis buys LiveRamp

Industry participants offered their views on the acquisition yesterday on LinkedIn.

Jared Belsky, co-founder and CEO, independent media agency Acadia, said:

“I am of two minds in how to analyze it:

  • Marketing Spin Half-Empty – Holding companies over the last 5+ years have bought a number of data entities (Merkle, Axiom, etc…), so this feels not that newish. LiveRamp is fantastic. We use them a ton at Acadia. Just saying, my half-empty analysis is that this is a play we have seen before but with a new spin.
  • Strategy Half-Full – What I think is underappreciated as everyone looks for the Claude ‘easy button’ and cant seem to find it when doing scaled work is that to make Claude/AI awesome, you need awesome structured data. Those who have the best structured data, and the talent to understand what that means, can do the other stuff. Its like above and below the waterline. The ‘wow’ stuff you see come out of AI, if at scale, for big orgs, tend to be the result of great data flows…”

Read more. Belsky is former CEO of Dentsu-agency 360i.

LiveRamp co-founder and former CEO Auren Hoffman, who sold his company to Acxiom in 2014, said of the Publicis acquisition on LinkedIn:

  • “…It was bittersweet seeing a company that one created and was a part of for almost a decade go into decline. But despite that, the company is still in really good position. Unfortunately they were not able to take advantage of their position. For the last decade they traded long-term positioning for short-term gain. That trade resulted in the ire of their customers and even more so their partners. Now that they will be in a new home in Publicis, I hope that we will see a renaissance of LiveRamp…”

Ken Rona, Chief AI Officer, JWX, said in part on LinkedIn:

  • “I kind of get the commercial logic, but the claim that LR is going to ‘remain agnostic’ is just [expletive emoji]. In the history of the world, no acquirer does not use their new shiny toy to advantage themselves. This is probably good for the other data providers as LR, already not a bastion of day one thinking is going to be wrapped up in acquisition integration. To be fair, the Publicis folks know what they are doing, but the thought that LR will be agnostic is just fiction.”

Gareth Neville, Director of Global Growth, Kepler said on LinkedIn:

  • “Talk about competitive pressure on other holdcos when so many of them rely on LiveRamp infrastructure. No doubt some big questions to come around neutrality, governance, data access, preferential treatment, whether rival agencies continue using LiveRamp at the same scale?? One thing is certain – the agency world we grew up with is officially over.”

Doug Chavez of Publicis’ Mars United Commerce retail media agency said on LinkedIn:

  • “Commerce is where growth happens. Owning the infrastructure to connect it is what separates a media plan from a growth system.The hard problem in retail media has never been inventory. It’s identity and measurement. Brands spend across Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, and a dozen retail media networks, then try to reconcile walled-garden numbers that don’t speak to each other and almost certainly overstate their own performance. Owning LiveRamp changes that…”

Babs Rangaiah, marketer and consultant, on LinkedIn:

  • “Wow… This is a big deal! The future of media/marketing will no longer be built around channels, but rather around identity, data and AI enabled systems. The companies that can connect all that into one unified and interoperable system are going to have a huge competitive advantage. And this deal sends a strong signal that Publicis is leading that effort.”

BRANDS

eMarketer: ChatGPT’s U.S. consumer

“The share of US internet users visiting ChatGPT’s website reached 30% in April, building on ChatGPT’s impressive growth trajectory of adding 1% of US internet users (or about 2.8 million new users) per month for the past 23 months. Anthropic might be getting a lot of the limelight these days with its focused strategy, state of the art model, and a faster growth of revenues, but it’s OpenAI that remains at the forefront of consumer adoption of LLMs, and there’s no evidence that it’s losing steam with US consumers.” – Vladimir Hanzlik, Chief Content Officer, eMarketer (May 17)

See the chart on LinkedIn. (May 17)

Related: “OpenAI’s ‘Code Red’ Hasn’t Revived ChatGPT’s Flatlining Growth” (May 15) – Andrew Lipsman on his “Media + Ads, Commerce” Substack (subscription)

TECH

A Conversion API (CAPI) for linear TV

On the latest episode of the Marketecture podcast, hosts Ari Paparo and Aperiam’s Eric Franchi discussed a new OpenAP-led alliance among major TV publishers aimed at helping advertisers better measure outcomes from TV ad buys.

The alliance includes:

  • A+E Global Media, AMC Global Media, FOX, Hallmark Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Scripps Networks, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery

Franchi described the effort as a kind of “Conversion API” (CAPI) for linear TV:

Eric Franchi: “[So,] basically a standardized CAPI to connect TV exposure to business outcomes. It’s again, I think, just a sign of the times. It’s really good that this is happening with TV. And god bless nine companies trying to figure out the economics on this one. We should check back on it.”
Ari Paparo: “Sounds great. CAPI is the future — or it’s the present, basically, shipping all of your server-side conversion data instead of using pixels and then figuring out what worked. It’s a little hard to set up, it’s a little time-consuming, so it makes sense for all the TV folks to band together and say, ‘Just do this one integration and we’ll give you the data you want.’”

Listen: “Episode 173: Tony Marlow Talks Innovation in Sports Advertising and Eric Gets into Microdramas” (May 15) – Marketecture Podcast on YouTube

More:

  • National TV Publishers Partner to Establish Shared Infrastructure for Unified Outcomes and Audience Buying Through OpenAP (May 13) – OpenAP
  • Nine Major TV Companies in Partnership to Tie Commercials to Business Results (May 13) – Variety (subscription)

From tipsheet: TV publishers are trying to build a federated measurement and outcomes layer meant to compete with the closed-loop advantages of major digital platforms.

The long-term opportunity is bigger than attribution alone. A standardized, machine-readable feedback layer between TV exposure and advertiser outcome data could allow linear TV inventory to participate more directly in omnichannel optimization systems.

If those signals become portable across platforms and workflows, they could eventually become usable by AI agents and automated buying systems, too.

Side note: Interesting discussion on the podcast about live sports where linear still reigns.

PLATFORMS

On making an AI startup for ads

On The Trade Desk’s “The Build” podcast, Sincera co-founders Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers speak with Ali Manning, co-founder of custom bidding algorithm company Chalice AI.

The three discuss Chalice’s evolution as well as Manning’s experience at Google and how that helped shape Chalice.

In particular, the discussion highlights the federated AI opportunity Chalice is pursuing versus closed-loop, walled-garden systems: custom models that inform bidding decisions across fragmented open internet inventory.

The Trade Desk invested in Chalice AI in 2021 and acquired Sincera in 2025.

Excerpt from the podcast (lightly edited):

Mike O’Sullivan: “In some ways Chalice and Sincera are so synergistic because you guys use models, we generate metadata. And that’s true, but the business model and who the customer is… Chalice is our customer, but Sincera is not your customer. So that’s where the diff is really exaggerated.”

“I’m so scarred from having to do so much work with WPP at AppNexus and all these global integrations and ‘monster’ feature lists and things to build that are never used. It’s very scary how much time can be invested with nothing.”

“And so I was always terrified of that again. That was just an input into the way we did it. But all this to say, everyone knows who Chalice is.”

“And when that tipping point happened — if it was anything like us — before you even realized it. You’re used to explaining to people for the first time what Chalice is. And they’re like, ‘Of course, I know you guys.’”

Ali Manning: “Well, what’s interesting is we’re ad-tech-famous, but we are not brand-famous and even agency-team-famous. I go to a brand conference and I am explaining not just what Chalice is, but what custom AI modeling is, what custom algorithms are. And so we still have to do that.”

Listen: “Ali Manning on Co-Founding Chalice and Putting the Advertiser First in Ad Tech” (May 5) – “The Build with Mike O’Sullivan” on The Trade Desk’s The Current

From tipsheet: Though not AI-specific, this podcast is a great insider-y look at founding ad tech startups, competitive dynamics and the influence of walled gardens like Google.

One subtext: Investors don’t fund ad tech for 2x outcomes. AI reintroduces the possibility of category-defining leverage.

TECH

Opinions

AI

Sell-side

  • “Why Supply-Side Curation Belongs at the Ad Server” – Gabriela Menna, Director, Supply Curation and Enablement, FreeWheel on FreeWheel’s blog
  • “Server-side implementations for AdTech: The architecture powering the next era of digital advertising” – Jeffrey Wheeler, VP of Product, Didomi on IAB Tech Lab’s blog

PEOPLE MOVES

Now hiring

  • “Excited to officially welcome Adam Gerber to the Media[dot]net team this week as our Head of Strategy.” (May 15) – Ken Lagana, CRO, Media[dot]net on LinkedIn
  • “19 years later, it’s beyond cool to be returning to Yahoo, joining the Yahoo DSP team that are simply crushing it in every way.“ (May 15) – Pete Danks, VP DSP Channel Strategy, Yahoo on LinkedIn

MORE

  • The brands winning at AI started with process not tech (May 15) – Digiday (subscription)
  • YouTube Inserts Itself Further Into the Creator-Ad Morass (May 15) – Mike Shields on his Next in Media Substack
  • “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search” (May 15) – Google Search Central
  • Marketing operating system Nectar Social raises $30M Series A led by Menlo (May 13) – TechCrunch
  • Pacvue Launches MCP Server, Making Commerce Media Data Accessible Across Enterprise AI Tools (May 14) – press release