Ep 19: Why Publicis Bought LiveRamp — Identity Data, AI & the Future of Advertising

Publicis just made one of the biggest advertising acquisitions in years — purchasing identity platform LiveRamp in a $2.54 billion all-cash deal.

But this story is much bigger than a merger announcement.
In this episode, Kelly and Sean break down why identity data has become one of the most valuable assets in modern advertising, how the industry evolved after the decline of third-party cookies, and why AI-powered marketing increasingly depends on high-quality consumer data.

The conversation explores:
Why LiveRamp became strategically valuable
How identity graphs actually work
The shift away from traditional cookie tracking
Why advertisers are obsessed with audience targeting
The growing tension between personalization and privacy
How AI is reshaping advertising infrastructure
Why Publicis sees this as a long-term power play
The future of audience targeting, retail media, and ad tech
Kelly and Sean also debate the consumer side of the equation:
Is personalized advertising genuinely helpful… or increasingly invasive?

If you work in advertising, media, marketing, analytics, retail media, ad tech, or AI strategy, this episode offers one of the clearest explanations yet of where the industry is heading next.

Key Topics Covered

• Publicis acquisition of LiveRamp
• Identity graphs explained
• The future of digital advertising
• Life after third-party cookies
• AI and advertising data
• Consumer identity targeting
• Retail media growth
• Personalized advertising
• Privacy vs personalization
• Data collaboration platforms
• Advanced audience targeting
• Programmatic advertising trends
• The future of ad tech
• Customer identity infrastructure

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

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And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Good to see you, Sean. How's it going?

SPEAKER_03 0:18

It's going okay. How are you, Kelly?

SPEAKER_00 0:21

I'm pretty good. You know, we are on the edge of a holiday weekend here, so I'm excited. What do you do this weekend?

SPEAKER_03 0:29

Uh, with all of the rain, probably not a whole lot. Where where I live, it's supposed to be pretty rainy. Probably uh maybe I'll go outside and grill, nevertheless, with like a raincoat on just to get it in, but otherwise, no, no big plants. How about you?

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Um, you know, I think we'll do some pool time. We'll, you know, get get that that little kid in the in some floaties and in the pool and a lot of sunscreen, but um, you know, nothing. Everybody that I'm talking to is telling me that they're taking it easy this weekend and that they're just like tired. They're not doing anything crazy. So, you know, maybe we just need to take a beat.

SPEAKER_03 1:07

Yeah, I mean, not to put you on the spot, but do you think that that's more of like a demographic shift in terms of the who you're talking to?

SPEAKER_02 1:13

I feel like we're we're we're aging into a a phase where my peers are tired.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

No, I was talking to a young client on the phone this morning who Fair enough. I presumed was gonna do something really exciting. And he said, I'm gonna sleep. So I think that's just where we are. And um, you know, maybe everyone's tired after all this big news this week.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

Yeah. Super big news.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

I think so. And you know, for a little more detail of what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the publicist deal.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah, acquiring live loop.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Live live.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

I think yeah, live lamp. Yeah, I love lamp. Live live ramp. Yeah, we could keep that in. Maybe make that the cold open.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Live ramp. So in a ramp. Staggering $2.54 billion all cash deal. Publicist announced they're buying up the data collaboration and identity platform live ramp at $38.5 per share, which is a 30% premium over where they were trading just a couple days ago. So, you know, this was obviously something they really wanted. Um it it means a lot in our industry. You know, I I think for those familiar with LiveRamp, LiveRamp was that neutral tool, that that Switzerland of identity management, everybody used it, now being owned by one of the largest holding companies. What does that mean? So I thought it made sense to spend some time today, Sean, talking about this. What does it mean for our ecosystem? What are some of the reasons that all was done? And just kind of unpacking a little bit of this. So I'd love to get your initial reaction and then we can dive a little deeper.

SPEAKER_03 2:59

Yeah. So I think I I want to kind of take us back to the the mid-range of the internet. Not the 90s, but more of like the aughts of the 2000s. I think that might be a good place to start to kind of understand the intrinsic value of a company like LiveRamp. This is gonna be an issue. This whole pod. I wasn't expecting coming into today's pod, I was not expecting LiveRamp to be an issue. Of all the things I could pronounce, it didn't even cross my mind. But here we are, I'm just gonna mushmouth my way through it. Apologies, everyone. But kind of back in the day, right, you'd have this cookie and you'd go to a website, a cookie would be placed on your browser, and then that cookie would kind of follow you throughout the internet and kind of see what you're doing. And initially it was it was four smart things, right? The idea was hey, I visited this website for the first time, and it took a while to upload images and kind of show the website as as you would like, because this is the mid-range of the internet. So like internet speeds just aren't there yet, but it's cool to see pictures, and so it takes a little bit of time to load. What cookies would kind of initially do was you would load the website and it would remember you. And then you'd kind of go off, do your own thing, and then if you wanted to come back, and let's call it a news website or something, and you want to see the news later in the day, you'd be like, oh, Kelly's back. We haven't changed much on the website, so let's keep most of what was loaded earlier and just kind of have it here ready for when Kelly comes back. And then these two news articles here, we'll kind of just swap them in with whatever's updated. So it would refresh and reload your page a lot faster. Over time, those cookies became more complicated and they started to track who you were, what you were doing, what you were buying. A lot of the world walled gardens of the world, the Facebooks, all of those, would kind of then like understand your data from the Facebook side and then also what you were doing out there on the internet, and kind of then, you know, capture all of that to create an identity of who that cookie thought that you were. So for a long time, that's what cookies did. However, you know, globally, there's been a kind of pressure to move away from these like one size, I can get everything about you type solutions. And so cookies have kind of faced regulatory pressure in different places at different kinds of intensity, right? I think Europe is probably the standard point to in terms of like the most privacy regulations. And so functionally, cookies just couldn't do what they used to do. And as that kind of pressure has grown, the shift has been more into these identity solutions. And live ramp was the premier identity solution because it functioned as you know, you see this in a lot of articles, Switzerland, right? It was a neutral party. It gave everyone identity stuff. An identity solution at a very high level, and I'm gonna oversimplify everything for the sake of our pod, is to say you have a phone. Your phone resides in this house. You also log into this laptop. I think, based on all of these devices, all of these locations, I think you are the same person between all of these things. Let me start to put together behavioral stuff about what you're doing on each of these devices to get a sense of who you are and what you do and what your interests are. Oh, you like to visit uh news websites a lot. Okay, that tells me a little bit about you. What type of news websites? That tells me more. LiveRamp would kind of collect all of that on you and then create a very neutral ID that they would kind of say, this is who I think Kelly is. These are all of the behaviors.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Not me personally, right? This is just kind of like the persona of me, right?

SPEAKER_03 6:27

Well, at scale, right? It's like all of this underlying data around people, identity solutions, et cetera, to kind of say, these are the types of behaviors that you engage in. This is who we think you are. And then as an identity solution, would offer that up to say, okay, if anyone wants to kind of connect in and feed this data, we can kind of match that device ID, figure out if this is roughly the same person. And then through kind of a match rate process to say, like, okay, between uh let's call it a retail media's uh CRM, customer relation database type thing, we think these four million people are the same between our identity graph solution and your underlying data. Yes, you have eight million people, but we can't figure out who those other four million are. So all told, here's all of the information you didn't have on these people that is available in your retail media, you know, data. But now we can also tell you the types of TV shows that they like, uh, where they like to shop, uh, what types of food they like to eat when they're not doing grocery store shopping, what fast foods you know places they go to. All of that kind of became at its core what identity was about. And so marketers crave this in today's world. They love it. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, I mean, who why wouldn't they? They want to serve me up the content. And you know, Sean, I've had so many conversations with people about this because you know, coming from the advertising industry, there's like the school of thought that this is creepy and I don't like it when I show up to a website and it's you know retargeting me and showing me an ad I've already looked at, or you know, I'm totally in the other camp and like call me biased, but hey, I don't have to go searching for that thing again. I want them to serve I want them to serve me things that are relevant to me. Why not? You know me, do it, serve it up. And so I feel like I talk to people and they're like, I hate it, or all right, I get it. I could deal with it.

SPEAKER_03 8:30

Yep. But I'm on the other end when we got the new car, I turned off all sorts of tracking. I broke the functionality of our car. Like I just I straight, straight up broke it. My wife downloaded the app for the car. It didn't work within 20 minutes of me getting in there. It just, it, it just did not function. I was like, I'm turning all these things off. You don't follow me, you don't track me, you no need to know anything about me of where I'm going, what I'm doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

As soon as we showed up today, for those viewing this in the the video, when Sean was wearing a white shirt and I was wearing a black shirt, I knew we were gonna be on opposite ends of the shirt.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yep. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_03 9:07

I actively I actively dirty my like data chain. Like I make up every time I do different profiles, I make up where I am. In Google Maps, I I believe I stored my home dress as somewhere in Ohio and my business address is somewhere in like Wisconsin. I purposely just try to make it so that when they do the the you know the panel matches, that the match rate for me is incredibly low because it's a it can't be the same guy. This guy over here is doing this. And this well, this can't be happening. So yeah. Uh Sean. Yeah. Sean, Sean, Sean. Yeah, a little different.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised. Publicists.

SPEAKER_03 9:43

Back to back to publishless.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Back to Publicis.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

So they've they've made this investment.

SPEAKER_03 9:49

Big bet.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Huge. So what does this mean? What do you think that this means for for our industry and for Publicis?

SPEAKER_03 9:57

Yeah. So I think for Publicists in particular, right? If we think about uh not to kind of go into the weeds on AI, but part of the pitch is you're not gonna get good AI without good data. Live ramp, great data. Great. So if we think about the future and where the power sits, it's with folks that have good to great data in terms of what the future looks like between agentic IA, all this stuff, right? Publicis is betting on trying to kind of be at the forefront of having both the data to serve their client needs, but able to go out into market and kind of do everything from an end-to-end solution. If I know everything about kind of data targeting all of these things, I can help you very upstream when you start to think about creative and thinking about brand muses. And I want to go after and kind of go out and conquest a new audience because my current audience is not buying my stuff anymore. So I need to find a new, new, new person. How do I craft that brand identity?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Bam.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Live ramp is a solution, gives you all of that rich detail that I'll talk about. Here's all of the types of people that are buying your product or similar products that should be part of your core audience from a targeting perspective. Now that helps shape creative. It helps shape brand strategy, it helps shape the insights that kind of drives at its core what brands do. Then in terms of like going out, finding the right person at the right time, is then using that identity graph to kind of shape the actual targeting and underlying kind of ad buys themselves. So now you're kind of like, now phases one and two of the whole ad ecosystem all sit within this new acquisition. And then the third piece is like now that the campaign has run, what's all of this post-analysis? What am I looking at in terms of the market? What are my kind of analytics? What are my insights? How do I optimize? I can now start to feed that, right? And I can do optimization. I can see, okay, what was my success in terms of conversion? What is my household penetration of this new audience target that I thought that I was going to go after and advertise against that I don't have today? That all sits within kind of a singular identity solution, right? In in theory, on paper. So like if you can execute it, you've got the full ecosystem of everything advertising does from the very beginning of ad planning all the way through to kind of post-campaign execution. And so if pulled off correctly, right, it is the single, you know, single stop shop in a world where increasingly that's harder to do because of the increasing walled gardens between retail media or all of these things, right? So if they are sitting at the middle of that, that is a huge potential across all of their business, right? Their creative shops, their analytics shops, all of those things, uh, that makes it an incredibly powerful offering. It only furthers kind of the whole like pitch they're making to market of like, you know, uh, here we are as one company end to end. Uh, you know, this is why you should come work with us and not kind of a competitive hold co. And so like, in theory, if if executed correctly, right, it could be amazing in terms of execution. PowerPoint. And like it's not a $2 billion deal. It's an upside of, you know, multi-billion dollars worth of earnings over a decade kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

So your take here is, you know, paying up for this, this investment, if if executed, well worth it.

SPEAKER_03 13:14

100%, right? Because like and it's and it goes also to like something that we're seeing in our data, right? Where we've started to track advanced audiences versus like regular old audiences. So advanced audiences could be anything from like complex demographic targeting, right? Where you're not just targeting on, you know, age or sex, you're also targeting on things like income or socioeconomic status or things like that. Um, it could be behavioral, firmographic, uh, psychographic, all of these fancy words to kind of just say, I'm trying to find a piece of who you think you are or who how how you identify, on top of just saying, I need anyone in this age range.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Are you the person who does their Christmas shopping on Black Friday, or are you the person who's in the store December 23rd?

SPEAKER_03 13:59

I would say at points in my life I've been both people.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Well, and based on our earlier conversation, you you've you've done that to confuse LiveRamp.

SPEAKER_03 14:10

No, it's it's more it's more functionally as I as a dad, and I've handed off more of the work to Santa Claus. I've had to I've I've had to change my buying behavior as Santa Claus has stepped in and helped. So like my my holiday uh shopping has has shifted over time. Whereas before Santa Claus was pitching in and helping, it was like two days before Christmas, wondering, does someone really want this pair of socks? I'm not too sure, but I need to bring something.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

I had a conversation with my girlfriend the other day about this, and she said that uh her and her husband divide up the articles of clothing that they buy for their sons, and and her husband's exclusively in charge of shoes.

SPEAKER_03 14:51

It's actually kind of an interesting take.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Yeah. I like that.

SPEAKER_03 14:57

I don't I don't hate it.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

So anyway, a little foof of thought there. Yeah, if she's a listener of the pot, don't hate it. Not that in my opinion matters, but pretty pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. But so like, so we're tracking this audience stuff, right? And it's about for the example of like Black Friday, you're trying to find with audience-based buying, right? It might just be that, like, generally speaking, I know that this is the demographic that goes holiday shopping. I'm just gonna do this broad-based. You should come buy our toys. But with identity and doing advanced demos, I don't want just anybody who's doing the shopping. I want to try to get as close as possible to the people who haven't started their holiday shopping yet by Black Friday, and then only target them in the hopes that I'm getting higher conversion on whatever campaign I'm running. I want to make this drive action and behavior. So that's where a lot of this behavioral data comes in. This is where a lot of like that extra oomph comes in. And so what's interesting is like when you start digging into like some of the things that we are tracking in terms of like going after and looking around audiences, right? Like from an advanced audience perspective, it is growing decently fast, right? Again, like the the layers on, things like that. But where we're seeing a lot of growth is really in things like uh contextual targeting. So um contextual might be something akin to this person likes food, I want to run during a food show, or maybe placing an ad on a on an Instagram food influencer, uh, so that it's this context of like they like food, I'm going to show up where food is. Um, in many cases, we're seeing that growing at like from a Kager, you know, annual growth rate, uh, 30 to 40 percent year over year for the past, you know, four or five years. Um, so like that's that's an interesting piece in terms of where we're seeing some of this growth. Universally across the board, we've seen like B2B targeting spike, um, which is always really interesting to me because like I I might be a business decision maker, but like I do watch content. Like I'm not just in my business decision-making framework anytime I go to LinkedIn. Like, I'm also thinking about my job when just watching something and streaming. Like if I'm on Apple TV, which doesn't really have ads, but like if I'm watching something on Peacock, I'm still also doing the same type of decision making, but like, yeah, like I'm just watching it. Like, so it's almost this like doubling down on this contextual is like a lot of the B2B targeting. It's like I just don't want regular contextual. I want a business person in a business only environment, which I do find interesting, but like that that is growing leaps and bounds for us, which again, like uh I'm not, I'm not that one I'm less convinced on because business decision makers are everywhere. And like no surprise here, but like a lot of the uh like what we might classify as like health and medical targeting is also growing leaps and bounds. So it's not just trying to find and saying, like, contact your blah blah blah blah about this medication. It's saying I only want to find the right folks that potentially have this disease state and only talk to them rather than talk to everybody. So it's interesting, right? But like we are seeing growth here. It is clearly a growth engine for the market. So it makes a hundred percent sense why we're seeing identity.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

I think what you're also saying is that it's a it's enabling smarter buys so that you're not wasting money on people who were already gonna do what you wanted to them to do or have already done it. You're really zeroing in on exactly who you need to convert, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:24

Yeah. The only thing I would say is is maybe mistakenly, you've touched the third rail of advertising. And that is, is ad impressions truly wasted? And I would just are like, the one thing that I would hesitate is you do have a camp, 100%, that says, if I want to do targeting, I want to find the right person right time to do something that I want them to do from a behavioral perspective, buy something, consider me, download an app. Some marketers will say, if it's not that right person, it's a wasted impression. Other marketers are like, well, how do you actually expand your pool? So you find this person at the right time right now, but what about your awareness? Like for the next time you do this, you can't keep asking the same person to buy a phone from you. There's only so many phones this person will buy over their lifetime. You need to find more people that are interested in your phone. So it's never a wasted impression. You're always keeping top of mind for folks. That's the other camp. Not that you are purposely advocating for it, but I know uh there's a lot of folks out there that would go into a rage on like there's never such a thing as a wasted impression. And then others will say, like, yes, all of this is waste. I hate anything where I can't do targeting because it's just money that I'm spending that doesn't need to be spent. And I've heard both ways, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

As soon as I said it, I was I was I was thinking of walking it back because the thing is, I can't tell you how many times I've made a decision of something I don't want to buy. And then that that ad kept coming and kept creeping, and all of a sudden it's in my cart. It's in my cart.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

There you go. Advertising works. Just if I'm relentless.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

That that's why we're here, Sean.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

Yep. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Well, okay. So I think we've covered a lot.

SPEAKER_03 20:11

Yeah. Any other things. No, right? I think I think it's one of those. And and I'll be interesting, right? Because a few of the other hold codes have tried to go down this path with mixed results. Uh Publicis has a lot kind of uh at their back in terms of of tailwinds that's driving a lot of strength in their market right now or in the market right now. Um you know, they're doing uh from all objections, like all kind of angles uh pretty well. Um so like this this could be the company that that pulls it off. Um would just highlight though, like there are there have been attempts at this in terms of uh you know putting identity spines at the core of the business and trying to then use that to drive more business. I think time will tell. Um it's certainly not a uh I wouldn't frame it as anything other than a smart choice. It's just gonna be a question of how smart.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Well, let's leave it there, Sean. I think that was a great synopsis. I'm excited to see where this goes. And as always, love spending time with you.

SPEAKER_03 21:13

Have a great holiday weekend. That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.