Following Publicis’s announcement of its LiveRamp acquisition, ad technology executives gathered at Cannes (at Il Teatro restaurant, hosted by Hightouch co-CEO Tejas Manohar) to work through what fills the gap in the identity infrastructure market. Pitch decks were shredded and remade. New marketing collateral went up across multiple vendors within days. The post-LiveRamp successor race is underway.
The core problem is structural. CMOs and their teams do not want first-party data flowing through infrastructure owned by a holding company that also runs a competing agency. Bob Walczak, CEO of MadConnect, noted that before the announcement, multiple holding company agencies were already preparing to let LiveRamp contracts lapse; the acquisition only accelerated that timeline. Manohar’s position captures the pitch that competitors are now making: “I really believe that the market and the ecosystem need a neutral party, and that’s the position that we’ve been playing in.” Two clusters of alternatives are forming: cloud-native activation layers that keep first-party data inside the client’s own stack (built on Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery), and a fragmented identity-graph market of European specialists, email-based graphs, and ID5. The likely near-term outcome is patchwork stacks combining in-house data assets with external graphs and a cloud collaboration layer. Ciarán O’Kane of First Party Capital forecasts a wave of M&A as a result, with Cadent, ID5, and MadConnect named as potential targets.
LiveRamp’s real moat was never the identity graph itself but the marketplace and the breadth of connections built on top of it, as Winterberry Group’s Bruce Biegel noted. Any successor has to rebuild that network effect, not just the data linkage. That is harder than it looks. For more on how this consolidation is reshaping the identity layer, see our June 24 brief on LiveRamp, OpenAI, and Publicis.
Source: Publicis Groupe
