Scott Howe on building LiveRamp and ad tech's cycles of innovation

Scott Howe's entry into advertising was accidental. A yield management project at Boston Consulting Group convinced him that data was going to be the defining competitive advantage of the internet era. That conviction has quietly steered every decision since. It led him to Avenue A/Razorfish, where the team built Atlas into a buy-side ad server that went toe-to-toe with DoubleClick. Then he sold it to competitors. The logic was simple and turned out to be right: more data scale, better insights, bigger R&D base.

The aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft closed in a matter of weeks. Scott counts delivering the news to his team as one of his career highlights. Microsoft had the assets to dominate display, but a hard pivot to search scattered that talent across the industry. Including Jeff Green who went and built...well, you know. The rest is ad tech history.

At LiveRamp the instincts haven't changed. When cookie deprecation landed, Scott didn't route it through the existing org, he walled off a small team, gave them air cover, and let them move. That team was led by co-host Ian Meyers. The same principle drove the Acxiom services spinoff and still shapes how LiveRamp approaches every acquisition: find the right people, remove the obstacles, and don't slow them down.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc. Sincera was acquired by The Trade Desk, Inc.