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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Publicis-Liveramp Acquisition: Retail Media Ramifications
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Hello, happy Tuesday. I'm recording this in the waiting area at Atlanta Airport on my way to Chicago for xNertia's Customer Summit. My flight's been delayed an hour. Isn't business travel [00:00:15] glamorous? there was a bright side to my delay because it means that I could jump on this news about Publicis acquiring LiveRamp, that was announced on Sunday, and give it my full attention for a couple of hours and share [00:00:30] some initial thoughts.
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[00:00:32] Kiri Masters: So in case you've been living under a rock for the last forty-eight hours, Publicis acquired LiveRamp for two point two to two point five billion dollars, depending on which, uh, h- how you [00:00:45] look at the acquisition sum. And the discourse on LinkedIn has been very, very busy.
[00:00:52] But I cast my mind back to six weeks ago when I was actually at LiveRamp's RampUp [00:01:00] conference in San Francisco, and the con- the contrast is very interesting. RampUp, as an event, had become the destination for the data collaboration opportunity in retail [00:01:15] media. RampID was the identity layer underneath most of those conversations.
[00:01:21] Now, none of that disappears. At the event, there were commerce media networks of all shapes and sizes, [00:01:30] travel, financial services, retail, obviously. All very interested in this concept of collaboration in a way that would provide brand advertisers more distinct data [00:01:45] advantages and closed-loop measurement.
[00:01:46] 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 [00:02:00] 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.
[00:02:10] So I wanna run through them with you before getting to what this all means for [00:02:15] retail media. So first of all, the bull case is that this was a steal of a deal Eric Matlik at Bombora called it potentially the smartest acquisition of this decade. Oren Hoffman, who [00:02:30] was actually LiveRamp's former CEO and a co-founder of the company, thinks that the company should be a hundred billion dollar business on its own, and that new ownership could be the renaissance that the product needs.
[00:02:43] More on that later. Theme number two [00:02:45] is the agentic story. Publicis CEO, Arthur Sadoun has framed the deal as Publicis positioning for the AI agent era. Now, Ari Paparo, who is [00:03:00] 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 into something agents can actually use in real time.
[00:03:13] Hoffman himself [00:03:15] was drier in a comment under his own post. He said that all press releases need the word AI and agentic these days. Theme number three, the neutrality concern. With WPP [00:03:30] owning Infosum, Omnicom now owning Acxiom via the IPG deal, and Publicis owning LiveRamp, the independent identity layer of the ad industry has been put almost entirely consolidated [00:03:45] into the holdcos all within a very short period of time.
[00:03:50] Ben Day, who is founder of the Data Clean Room Institute, said on LinkedIn that Publicis can fix the product, But maintaining methodology neutrality across [00:04:00] competing holdco-aligned brands is a different problem in and of itself.
[00:04:05] Theme number four, the end of an era. argument contends that another major independent player has come off of the [00:04:15] market. The holdcos are gonna double down on proprietary tech, and the open ad tech ecosystem keeps shrinking. Miracle Ads is the only retail [00:04:30] media solution designed for both one P and three P Marketplace brands. Why does that matter? Marketplace sellers demand a seamless advertiser experience that still offers full funnel ad formats, [00:04:45] and retailers need a flexible solution that allows you to scale your media business.
[00:04:50] Learn more@miracle.com. That's M-I-R-A-K l.com.
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[00:04:58] Kiri Masters: And lastly, the one that I [00:05:00] wanna 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.
[00:05:11] And this is the question of whether RMNs and retailers own [00:05:15] 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 piece is definitely one to read. takes stood out from the rest of my [00:05:30] LinkedIn hot take trawling for the substance that was behind them.
[00:05:35] So Oren Hoffman, who again, was one of the co-founders of RampUp and a former CEO, he wrote a very candid post about the sale. [00:05:45] 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.
[00:05:55] That the metric he says matters most is connections per [00:06:00] customer, and he said most customers are stuck at around ten connections when the system should really be able to support four hundred, five hundred, even a thousand. Customers want more in his telling, but the product is just too expensive, [00:06:15] it's too slow, it's too bureaucratic.
[00:06:17] Hoffman is bullish on what this new ownership from Publicis 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 [00:06:30] Jon Flugstad, who is the chief business officer at MetaRouter, and just as a disclosure, MetaRouter is a client of mine.
[00:06:36] And Jon is looking at the same product and reaching a different conclusion. His view is that the acquisition can't fix what is structurally [00:06:45] broken. He says that there are thirty-hour audience syncs in a world that decides in milliseconds. He says that per record economics that punish you exactly as your data scales.
[00:06:58] He calls it a graph [00:07:00] 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. MetaRouter sells the alternative, but it is [00:07:15] still worth taking seriously alongside Hoffman's because the two industry insiders disagree in an interesting way.
[00:07:23] The founder thinks that the product can be fixed with focus and investment. The operator thinks the [00:07:30] architecture itself is wrong for what is really coming next. Publicis era of ownership will start answering Which one of those viewpoints is correct? And now getting to the retail media question.
[00:07:41] I'll keep this brief because, like I said, the drum piece is where I [00:07:45] 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 [00:08:00] has moved from theoretical to practical.
[00:08:03] RMNs that have been deferring this question just had their bill come due. So here are a few things that I'm watching here. One, does Publicis actually [00:08:15] fix the product that Hoffman describes? Or do the structural concerns that Jon Flugstad raises hold up? Number two, do other retailers and RMNs accelerate their owned graph investments?[00:08:30]
[00:08:30] Costco has a modular tech stack, which I covered on this podcast a few weeks ago, suddenly looks like even a more prescient decision than it did a few weeks ago. Number three, does the conversation [00:08:45] around cross-commerce media network collaboration reset around different infrastructure assumptions?
[00:08:53] Six weeks ago at RampUp, the working premise was that data collaboration would be where the next phase of [00:09:00] retail media gets won, and that could still be true. what changed on Sunday is who is sitting at the
[00:09:07]