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Retail Media Breakfast Club
Publicis Buys LiveRamp: What It Means for Retail Media, Data Ownership & the Future of Identity
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Hello, Happy Tuesday. I'm recording this in the waiting area at Atlanta Airport on my way to Chicago for Exnerta's Customer Summit. My flight's been delayed an hour. Isn't business travel glamorous? But there was a bright side to my delay because it means that I could jump on this news about Publicis acquiring Live Ramp that was announced on Sunday and give it my full attention for a couple of hours and share some initial thoughts. So in case you've been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, Publicis acquired LiveRamp for 2.2 to $2.5 billion, depending on which how you look at the acquisition sum and the discourse on LinkedIn has been very, very busy. But I cast my mind back to six weeks ago when I was actually at Liveramp's Ramp up conference in San Francisco, and the contrast is very interesting. Ramp up as an event had become the destination for the data collaboration opportunity in retail media. Ramp ID was the identity layer underneath most of those conversations. Now none of that disappears at the event there were commerce media networks of all shapes and sizes, travel, financial services, retail obviously all very interested in this concept of collaboration in a way that would provide brand advertisers more distinct data advantages and closed loop measurement. Now none of that disappears overnight. But this press release on a Sunday does change what assumptions you can make about who owns the plumbing and therefore how much you trust it. So I've gathered up a bunch of hot takes from LinkedIn and they've really clustered together into about five or so themes. So I want to run through them with you before getting to what this all means for retail media. So first of all, the bull case is that this was a steal of a deal. Eric Matlick at Bombora called it potentially the smartest acquisition of this decade. Oren Hoffman, who was actually LiveRamp's former CEO and a co founder of the company, thinks that the company should be $100 billion business on its own and that new ownership could be the renaissance that the product needs. More on that later. Number two is the agentic story. Publicist CEO Artur Sadun has framed the deal as publicist positioning for the AI agent era. Now Ari Paparo, who is the founder of marketecture, pressure tested that in an article that he wrote yesterday, and his read is that it works if Publicis modernizes Liveramp's product in into something agents can actually use in real time. Hoffman himself was drier. In a comment under his own post he said that all press releases need the word AI energentic these days. Theme number three the neutrality concern with WPP owning Infosum Omnicom now owning Axiom via the IPG deal, and Publicis owning Liveramp via the independent identity layer of the ad industry has been put almost entirely consolidated into the holdcos, all within a very short period of time. Ben Day, who is founder of the Data Clean Room Institute, said on LinkedIn that publicists can fix the product, but maintaining methodology neutrality across competing Holdco aligned brands is a different problem in and of itself. Theme number four the end of an era this argument contends that another major independent player has come off of the market, the holdcos are going to double down on proprietary tech and the open adtech ecosystem keeps shrinking. Miracle Ads is the only retail media solution designed for both 1P and and 3Pmarketplace brands. Why does that matter? Marketplace sellers demand a seamless advertiser experience that still offers full funnel ad formats, and retailers need a flexible solution that allows you to scale your media business. Learn more@miracle.com that's M I R A K L.com and lastly, the one that I want to spend more time on today, the retailer specific angle. Now I wrote about this at length in a column for the Drum Today and we'll link up to it in the show notes when it goes live. And this is the question of whether RMNs and retailers own their identity infrastructure or simply just rent it and how. That question just got a lot more pressing. So if you're in retail media, that pace is definitely one to read. Two takes stood out from the rest of my LinkedIn hot take trawling for the substance that was behind them. So Oren Hoffman, who again was one of the co founders of Ramp up and a former CEO, he wrote a very candid post about the sale and the most interesting thing in it isn't the celebration. It's actually in this kind of diagnosis that he makes. He says that LiveRamp's core product has barely changed in a decade, that the metric he says matters most is connections per customer. And he said most customers are stuck at around 10 connections when the system should really be able to support 400, 500, even a thousand customers want more, in his telling, but the product is just too expensive, it's too slow, it's too bureaucratic. But Hoffman is bullish on what this new ownership from publicists could unlock. But he's also describing a product that hasn't kept pace with what the market needs. Another voice in this chorus is John Flugstadt, who is a chief business officer at metarouter. And just as a disclosure, metarouter is a client of mine and John is looking at the same product and reaching a different conclusion. His view is that the acquisition can't fix what is structurally broken. He says that there are 30 hour audience sinks in a world that decides in milliseconds. He says that per record economics that punish you exactly as your data scales. He calls it a graph that you don't own, you can't audit, can't take with you. And now a roadmap governed by a holding company. Now this view admittedly is self interested. Metarata sells the alternative, but it is still worth taking seriously alongside Hoffman's because the two industry insiders disagree in an interesting way. The founder thinks that the product can be fixed with focus and investment. The operator thinks the architecture itself is wrong for what is really coming next. The publicist era of ownership will start answering which one of those viewpoints is correct. And now getting to the retail media question. I'll keep this brief because like I said the drum pieces where I made the full argument, but I'll give you the short version with three of the four major holdcos now owning identity infrastructure that retail media has been building on top of the question of who actually controls your customer, Graph has moved from theoretical to practical. RMNs that have been deferring this question just had their bill come due to so here are a few things that I'm watching here. 1. Does Publicis actually fix the product that Hoffman describes? Or do the structural concerns that John Flugstad raises hold up? Number two do other retailers and RMNs accelerate their owned graph investments? Costco has a modular tech stack which I covered on this podcast a few weeks ago, and that suddenly looks like even a more prescient decision than it did a few weeks ago. Number three does the conversation around cross commerce media network collaboration reset around different infrastructure assumptions? 6 weeks ago ramp up, the working premise was that data collaboration would be where the next phase of retail media gets won. And that could still be true. But what changed on Sunday is who is sitting at the table.