Now that the initial frenzy has subsided a bit, I thought it would be a good time to get into what Publicis’s proposed purchase of LiveRamp really means to marketers like you.
Historically, ad agencies competed on a few foundations: creative capabilities, buying power, media inventory, and media relationships. Now, massive holding companies are investing billions outside of those foundations, data infrastructure.
This deal is significant because it indicates to all of us in marketing and advertising that a few key areas led by data infrastructure are becoming the center of the future of media buying: first-party data, identity, measurement, and AI-driven targeting.
The Deal Really Indicates...
After 30 years in advertising, I’ve seen this industry reinvent itself more times than I can count. I’ve seen it shift from relationship-driven media buying to algorithms and data. This is one of those moments we should be paying close attention to. It’s a clear sign of the direction the industry is moving.
Priorities have changed; what agency services have to provide is less about past foundations and more about the future’s data, attribution, and measurement, with a heavy dash of AI to wrap it all up.
Marketers should care because this sends signals and validates concerns around audience ownership, attribution, retail media, cookie-less targeting, and signal loss.
AI, Attribution, and the Measurement Challenge
AI needs cleaner data than organizations have been able to provide. Agencies are looking at ways to build ecosystems to gain more control of all of it.
Based on acquisitions made by Publicis and similar holding companies, they are no longer your traditional agency holding company offering the services on their mastheads. They are morphing into technology businesses.
Marketing leaders are continuing to be asked hard questions about performance: “What do you have to show for the spend?” Which is understandable. At the same time, the systems that run underneath advertising are becoming more difficult to explain.
Attribution becomes more modeled than directly measured as it relies less on observable data. This is happening due to cookie loss, privacy restrictions, fragmented devices, walled gardens, and AI optimization systems. Not all bad in and of itself, but still a big shift.
It doesn’t mean the reporting is wrong when inferred audiences, probabilistic matching, and modeled conversions are used, but it does make it harder to achieve independent validation.
It’s not just about vague reporting. It’s about a loss of confidence in your results, how the attribution works, what was influenced by AI, and what is incremental.
This is not shared as a criticism of AI, ID resolution, or advanced measurement. Thanks to new technologies, advertising is more effective than it was even 5 years ago. It’s not about whether they should be used, but how they are used.
Why Transparency is More than a Buzzword
I realize marketers have more on their plate than they can handle, and the mergers and acquisitions between agencies and by holding companies are not priority number one. But the more vertically integrated advertising becomes, the more important transparency should be for marketers.
One of LiveRamp’s benefits has been its neutrality. So, it makes sense that marketers may wonder how that neutrality and independent validation can continue if they become part of a multinational advertising company.
This creates a lack of transparency, leading to a growing challenge. Leaders must justify budgets and confidently communicate not only results but the WHY, if not also the HOW behind their advertising strategy.
When holding companies buy up smaller agencies, AdTech platforms, and tools, they gain more control over data inputs. This leads to less transparent reporting when more of the planning, buying, targeting, optimization, attribution, and measurement happens within systems that you can’t verify.
It means they control more of the audience identity systems, measurement tools, and optimization platforms, along with the data flows that produce reporting.
It can also lead to limited access to raw data. More optimization decisions will happen within fewer and more proprietary systems that will make it more difficult to answer even basic, yet important questions that tell you what drives performance or how attribution was determined.
What Marketers Should Do Next
So, for marketers asking, what can I do about this; ask these questions to start.
- Who owns your audience data?
- How is attribution modeled?
- What are the tools using AI optimizing towards?
- What are the reporting limitations?
- Is explainability prioritized along with automation?
Your team or partners may not be able to answer all these questions, but how they approach the answers and their willingness to go deeper into the discussions with you may tell you all you need to know.
Where Does That Leave Us?
Back to what instigated this in the first place. LiveRamp’s biggest assets were independence and neutrality. The second a holding company owns the identity rails, everyone else starts wondering if the fox just bought the henhouse.
Technology should be an aid, not an obstacle, for marketers. But if the systems created to help and improve become too complex to understand the HOW and WHAT, then confidence erodes.
Advertising’s future will involve more automation, more sophisticated data systems, and, of course, more AI. But you’ll see that as things get more complex, transparency and clarity become even more valuable to marketers responsible for budgets.
I completely understand the strategy: Identity + AI + First-party data is the new arms race. It’s hard to be viewed as Switzerland once Publicis owns the map.
