Publicis says LiveRamp will stay neutral. The industry isn't buying it.

When Publicis Groupe announced Sunday that it would acquire LiveRamp for $2.2 billion in an all-cash deal, the reaction across the marketing industry was swift, and deeply skeptical.

The French holding company positioned the deal as a bold leap into the agentic AI era, a bet that whoever controls data infrastructure controls the future of advertising. But for rivals, brand marketers, and independent ad tech players, the deal raises an unsettling question: Can LiveRamp, a platform that has long positioned itself as the “Switzerland of the identity landscape,” maintain that neutrality once it's tucked inside one of the world's most competitive agency groups?

The short answer, according to several marketing executives who spoke with The Current, is: almost certainly not. In an industry dominated by walled gardens, truly neutral infrastructure is becoming more like a rare commodity.

"What nobody fully anticipated was that the post-cookie world would also be the post-neutral-infrastructure world,” said a major retailer who wished to remain anonymous. “LiveRamp was the last big piece of shared infrastructure that didn't belong to someone with a dog in the fight. Now it does."

The ‘Switzerland of ad tech’ breaks down

LiveRamp is not just another ad tech company. Its popular RampID identity framework connects more than 25,000 publisher domains and more than 500 technology and data partners across 14 markets. Its clean room infrastructure is the backbone of how brands, retailers, agencies and media platforms collaborate and reconcile campaign data — often in direct competition with one another.

For years, CEO Scott Howe leaned into the Switzerland metaphor, a neutral ground where high-friction industry players can meet, resolve disputes and share data without fear of that data being weaponized against them. That positioning was the product's core value proposition, as much as any technical feature.

“Marketers would do well to remember the other ingredients they need for building reliable data — like a trusted, transparent value exchange,” Howe wrote in a 2023 op-ed on The Current. “These value exchanges ensure that consumers feel in control of their data and understand what it might be used for, and are actively offering their data in exchange for something of value from your company.”

Now, Switzerland belongs to one of the teams it was supposed to referee.

The concern is especially acute given the competitive dynamics at play. LiveRamp counts more than 70 agencies in its partner ecosystem, including WPP, Omnicom (which absorbed Interpublic Group late last year), Dentsu, Havas, and Stagwell, all of them now clients of a platform owned by their fiercest rival.

LiveRamp's leadership moved quickly to reassure the market. In a joint statement, the company said it "will continue to operate as a neutral, interoperable platform with open access across the ecosystem." Howe will remain CEO and report directly to Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun. The operating model, the companies said, will remain largely unchanged.

But critics argue that building that AI advantage on infrastructure that the entire industry depends on is precisely the problem.

“Publicis has already stated this move will give them a competitive advantage over other agencies, directly contradicting any notion of neutrality,” Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO at ID5, told The Current. “Brands working with other agencies will be fiercely protective of their greatest asset: their data. They are unlikely to be comfortable with Publicis having proximity to it. These brands will need to leverage truly independent and neutral rails to ensure their data can be used safely and efficiently to power their advertising strategies."

“The whole reason LiveRamp became the default was precisely because it wasn't aligned with any one part of the ecosystem. Buyers, sellers, and data providers all trusted it. That changes now, regardless of the corporate comms,” wrote Will Rand, co-founder of CTV AI curation agency CleanTap.

The industry has also heard similar assurances before — and watched them erode over time.

In an analysis posted to LinkedIn, Doug Ray, founder of Ray Media Advisory and former dentsu Media Americas CEO described the acquisition as “the end of the neutral middle.” He recalls that when IPG acquired Acxiom in 2018, “similar assurances were made, and within a few years, Acxiom's standalone growth had stalled and competitors had quietly begun routing around it.”

“The structural pressure on any acquired infrastructure asset is real: the parent company has every financial incentive to favor its own ecosystem, even without any explicit directive to do so. I think the publishers and retail media networks most embedded in LiveRamp's stack are wise to pursue dual-pathway identity now — not because Publicis will act in bad faith, but because optionality is always worth preserving.”

Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, compared the acquisition to Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2007, predicting it could trigger a new wave of consolidation across ad tech.

“As workflow execution commoditizes,” Kawaja wrote, “ownership of differentiated data and decisioning infrastructure becomes the primary source of durable competitive advantage.”

In other words, the infrastructure layer is becoming the business.

Data is the new power

Beneath the neutrality debate lies a larger truth the deal makes impossible to ignore: data is the defining strategic asset of the AI era, and whoever controls it wields disproportionate power. Whoever controls that pipe controls how well those agents perform. The identity layer becomes table stakes in doing so.

Publicis has not been subtle about its data ambitions. The holding company's $4.4 billion acquisition of Epsilon in 2019 established the template, absorbing a data and technology business to build a proprietary advantage that rivals couldn't match. The March 2025 acquisition of Lotame extended that playbook into the identity graph space. LiveRamp is the largest and most consequential move yet —a similar move to WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum last year.

“The reality is that incomplete, fragmented data limits the true promise of AI,” Molly Hjelm, corporate VP and head of retail media at Ace Hardware, a Publicis client, told The Current. “This acquisition has the potential to connect previously siloed data at an unprecedented scale. As a partner, we’re closely watching how Publicis will further democratize access to data and unlock more seamless, proprietary intelligence; and ultimately, how it can drive even stronger outcomes for Ace Hardware and our advertiser community.”

In the meantime, the industry is already reacting. Multiple sources said they believe rival holding companies and major brands are quietly accelerating conversations with alternative identity and clean room providers.

“Expect a sharp increase in calls, emails, and conversations with the other major identity and onboarding providers,” wrote Christopher Feo, SVP, sales and Partnerships, Unity CRO, which works with LiveRamp. “Change creates uncertainty, and many brands—particularly those that rely on LiveRamp but do not work with Publicis as their agency of record—will want to understand their options and diversify risk.”

The challenge is how intertwined LiveRamp is with the whole industry, Ray told The Current. “This won't make it easy to separate them from a client's existing infrastructure.”

For Publicis, the acquisition is a statement of intent: that in the AI era, data is king and the company intends to be its custodian.

For the rest of the marketing industry, it's a wake-up call that the identity marketplace, the shared commons that made modern programmatic advertising function, has just been privatized.