Omnicom was already planning to cut LiveRamp loose. Publicis buying it just moved up the date.
Before the deal, the plan was to let the contract with LiveRamp run its course until the first quarter of 2028 and walk away. Publicis changed that. The acquisition is expected to close by year end, and when it does, Omnicom CEO John Wren has made clear so does his holdco’s relationship with LiveRamp.
Because Acxiom, the data business Omnicom inherited when it acquired IPG last year, has spent the last several years building its own identity solution Real ID so that it wouldn’t have to be dependent on a third party for something as fundamental as identity. The Publicis deal didn’t change that plan so much as speed it up.
“That changed yesterday afternoon,” Wren said at the the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference yesterday. “I moved that drop dead date yesterday a year from now when we’ll be completely separated, even if we have to invest a little money to honor our contract for the balance of the year.”
Wren was blunt about why: “ I don’t see there is any way that you can get any value keeping LiveRamp independent of the rest of your infrastructure.”
His counterpart at Publicis Arthur Sadoun sent 500 emails to partners and rivals insisting otherwise.
Wren, it’s fair to say, was not among the convinced. Because, in his words, for LiveRamp to be of any real value to clients “it had to be Switzerland” — a neutral identity layer that publishers, retailers, brands and rival holdcos could all plug into without worrying who owned the pipes.
Publicis now does. That changes the calculation for its biggest rivals and partners.
“To be successful, I think the LiveRamp acquisition itself will be interesting to watch,” said Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell Group at the same conference. “You’re taking a platform whose core value has always been neutrality — the reason everyone felt comfortable exchanging data through it — and placing it inside an environment where that neutrality is no longer perceived to exist. Some holding companies will be wary about running their data through a LiveRamp owned by Publicis.”
CMOs will be too, he added. An automotive advertiser who competes with a Publicis client may simply choose not to use LiveRamp as a result. Removing that neutrality — or even just the perception of it regardless of whether it de facto still exists — is going to be a significant hurdle.
Big as the hurdles are for Publicis, they’re pretty steep for its rivals too. Few will find the exit as clean as Omnicom. Some relationships with LiveRamp run deeper – contracts harder to unwind, dependencies harder to replace and costs too high to move from fast. Omnicom was never that, according to Wren. Acxiom pays LiveRamp $50 million a year for data. LiveRamp pays Acxiom $50 million back for other services. It nets to zero, in other words. Neither side particularly depends on the other. Walking away was always going to be straightforward since the relationship was never as entangled as it looked.
Still, it wasn’t always that way. Acxiom and LiveRamp were the same company until 2018, when Acxiom split itself into two — selling its Marketing Solutions division to IPG for $2.3 billion and spinning out LiveRamp as an independent public company. When Omnicom acquired IPG last year, it got Acxiom too. Wren’s view is that Omnicom now has the piece that LiveRamp was always built around, and has spent years building the identifier to prove it doesn’t need the other half.
For now, at least, the day-to-day reality changes little. Omnicom’s chief technology officer Paolo Yuvienco was clear on that alongside Wren. The existing partnership with Acxiom isn’t going anywhere in the short term. The contracts are intact, the integrations still run and clients won’t notice a difference.
But Real ID is built differently to what its replacing, said Yuvienco. It’s cloud-native and interoperable by nature, able to pull in whichever identity graph is most useful for a given client or use case.
Whether its Real ID, UID or any other identifier for that matter, what Omnicom is building is something that doesn’t need to depend on any single provider. Its pitch to clients being: own your graph, don’t rent someone else’s.
PakarPBN
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