CANNES, FRANCE — LiveRamp has had a busy 2026 so far, inclusive of a conversation-stirring acquisition. Many of the data-collaboration platform’s biggest moves — a measurement partnership with OpenAI and its planned $2.2 billion takeover by Publicis Groupe, to name two — are again in the spotlight at Cannes Lions this week.
The ad-tech firm’s heightened profile at Cannes aligns with a larger shift that has seen the festival celebrating creativity gravitate more toward data-driven marketing and technology, areas that have been supercharged by the hype around artificial intelligence in recent years.
“All of the sudden, we’re the geeky, dorky kid who became popular,” said LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe in an interview.
Building on the tech theme, LiveRamp on Tuesday unveiled a new partnership with Adobe that expands its footprint further into the creative production realm. LiveRamp will supply shopper data to Adobe’s GenStudio for commerce media networks, pairing that data with Adobe’s Real-Time CDP Collaboration capability. Commerce media advertisers, in turn, will no longer need to rely on modeled audiences to inform their AI-generated creative, but now can have real transaction-level insights power their personalization efforts at scale.
“For the first time, someone can not just optimize their audience, but optimize the creative as well, down to a very granular level,” said Howe. “You can target a zillion different permutations of creative and figure out exactly what works.”
Collaboration at the core
A chief focus of LiveRamp is identifying platforms, which Howe calls “destinations,” that are starting to run advertising but looking to round out their measurement and data activation without needing to build a tech stack from scratch.
In recent years, that initiative has involved partnering with emergent apps in social, such as TikTok, as well as connected and TV streaming players like Netflix. The groundswell around AI advertising is a natural extension of that work as more channels, including search and shopping, are reoriented around chatbots.
“If data goes in to make the [chatbot] communication more effective, the content more effective, then shouldn’t data also be used to determine whether that was relevant content for the user? Of course it should,” said Howe.
LiveRamp’s exploratory team for these new destinations, which is led by Chief Connectivity and Ecosystem Officer Travis Clinger, began calling OpenAI frequently around its ads launch earlier this year, and the ChatGPT developer quickly realized that both companies share a lot in common.
LiveRamp is initially enabling ChatGPT advertisers to use its Conversions API Hub for extending measurement beyond cookie-based tracking, but has positioned itself as a longer-term partner for OpenAI’s advertising journey. OpenAI has a major presence at Cannes Lions for the first time, teeing up a test of advertiser appetites for a platform that is just four months old and angling to expand rapidly during a period when more companies are strating to question the soaring costs of AI development.
“Here’s a company that’s right on the leading edge saying ... we’re going to prove that the ROI pans out. I think it’s really smart,” said Howe of OpenAI. “It’s the best place to start. From the get-go, we’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, we think this works, but don’t trust us. Look at your results.’”
Outlook on Publicis
Around the announcement of the Publicis deal in May, Howe stated that it would unlock “greater resources and flexibility to scale our business.” On the resources front, the CEO is hoping to harness Publicis’ global scale to crack into international markets that only make up about 5% of LiveRamp’s revenue at the moment.
“If I look at my client base, they’re almost entirely global,” said Howe, referencing marketers like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola. “Quite honestly, I’ve probably disappointed them over the last decade because I haven’t been able to move fast enough in those global markets.”
Flexibility is a thornier topic. Publicis, which says it is buying LiveRamp to accelerate its bets on agentic AI, is taking over a platform that has long been valued for its collaborative capabilites. Skeptics have raised alarms that the deal will eventually advantage Publicis and may tarnish LiveRamp’s reputation as a neutral connective tissue between advertisers, platforms and publishers.
Howe acknowledged concern among some agencies, but emphasized that open-mindedness will continue to be a mandate for LiveRamp. The CEO added that the majority of LiveRamp’s clients are excited and curious about the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the year. He suggested that much of the harshest criticism stems from biased rivals that smell an opportunity to siphon market share and business from LiveRamp.
“Whatever assurance [agencies] need that we’re going to continue to be neutral — of course we are,” said Howe. “The whole value we’ve always brought is by working with everyone together in the industry.”
As much as Howe is pledging a commitment of neutrality, some agencies don’t seem convinced. WPP, a major Publicis rival, plans to stop its use of LiveRamp following the takeover, CEO Cindy Rose told Campaign at a Cannes discussion later Monday afternoon. LiveRamp declined to comment on the news.
