Publicis Groupe closed its $2.2 billion acquisition of data-collaboration platform LiveRamp on Monday, according to a press release. The finalization of the deal follows the companies agreeing to a consent order with the Federal Trade Commission last month which seeks to preserve LiveRamp’s neutrality. Even with those regulatory guardrails in place, some brand marketers appear to be jumping ship.
“You should be worried Publicis Groupe and LiveRamp. Yes we will leave. I am first in line,” Benoit Vatere, chief media and digital commerce officer at Liquid Death, posted on LinkedIn following the news. “Who in their right mind will let an holdco own your data and graph [sic]. Do you really think we are that stupid? All Liveramp competitors, tag yourself in the comment, business is coming your way.”
Vatere’s comment section was flooded with people promoting LiveRamp alternatives. A representative for Liquid Death verified that the beverage brand plans to move away from LiveRamp. Direct Publicis competitors in the agency space, including WPP and Omnicom, have signaled their intentions to wind down use of LiveRamp for months. Publicis did not immediately respond to a request for comment on potential brand marketer defections.
Publicis has positioned the deal, which was first announced in May, as a key piece of its strategy around artificial intelligence, including the ability to develop more sophisticated agentic frameworks on behalf of clients. The release shared more details of how the integration, which pairs LiveRamp tech with Epsilon data, will work to provide a plug-and-play option for bringing together and activating different data sets.
Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun and Chief Strategy Officer Carla Serrano also appear in a video explaining the benefits of the LiveRamp acquisition, stating it provides a third option for clients who are contending with either walled gardens that provide scale but take away control or the need to hire consultants to develop custom solutions that are time-intensive and costly.
“Our answer is the industry’s first AI growth engine, combining the speed, simplicity and instant results of plug and play, with full ownership and control, so clients can drive business impact without giving up autonomy over their data, their technology, or their future,” said Sadoun in a statement.
Clients can enhance their own first-party data sets with capabilities from LiveRamp’s RampID and Epsilon’s Identity offering. This will allow them to add more customer attributes and promises to make billions of more prospects addressable, the companies claim. The souped-up data sets can also be activated across LiveRamp’s ecosystem, which encompasses a wide range of publishers, tech platforms, walled gardens, retail media networks and large-language models — including OpenAI’s ChatGPT — as well as Publicis’ own media network.
Clients at the same time will not need to navigate the same level of legal processes, custom integration work or security considerations needed to broker partnerships with third-party platforms since Publicis and LiveRamp already have those relationships “pre-wired,” the release said. Publicis and LiveRamp reaffirmed that clients will maintain full ownership and control of their data and intellectual property and will not be locked into using specific technology partners.
