April 211 hour 7 mins
Scott Howe, CEO of LiveRamp, traces his career from BCG and Avenue A/Razorfish through the aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft and into his current role leading LiveRamp.
Scott Howe's entry into advertising was accidental. A BCG yield management project for Qantas convinced him data would be the defining competitive advantage of the internet era. That conviction led him to Avenue A/Razorfish, where the team built Atlas, a buy-side ad server rivaling DoubleClick, then spun it off and sold it to competitors to maximize data scale.
The aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft closed in weeks after Google bought DoubleClick. Scott counts delivering the news to his team as one of his career highlights. Microsoft's display position was stronger than most remember (it included Facebook's ad inventory), but a strategic pivot to search led to a talent exodus that seeded much of modern ad tech, including Jeff Green founding The Trade Desk.
At LiveRamp, Scott has applied the same principles consistently: when cookie deprecation hit, he stood up a skunkworks team outside the normal org (led by co-host Ian Myers). The same logic drove the Acxiom services spinoff and guides his acquisition playbook.
Key Takeaways
- Data scale over protection: Spinning Atlas out and selling it to competitors produced better insights than keeping it as proprietary agency technology.
- Acquisitions disperse talent and seed cycles: aQuantive and DoubleClick acted as dispersal events, sending people out to found the next generation of companies: The Trade Desk, Aggregate Knowledge, Rover, and others.
- Org structure determines response speed: Walling off a small, fast-moving team was LiveRamp's key move when cookie deprecation hit, something a standard org chart couldn't accommodate.
- Services and technology conflict as they mature: What starts as complementary eventually creates opposing incentives around margins, growth, and investment priorities.
- Preserve acquisitions, don't absorb them: Give acquired teams more resources and a bigger canvas rather than breaking them apart and folding them in.
Further reading on The Current: CTV Measurement and the Open Web
Chapters
- 00:00:00 - Meet Scott Howe
- 00:02:03 - Speed & Engineering Velocity
- 00:05:03 - Breaking Into Ad Tech
- 00:16:35 - Building & Spinning Off Atlas
- 00:30:55 - The aQuantive Deal
- 00:41:53 - Acxiom & LiveRamp Split
- 00:47:32 - Staying Sharp as a Long-Term CEO
- 00:53:31 - Scott's Acquisition Philosophy
- 01:00:01 - Client Obligation & Personal Drive
The Build with Mike O'Sullivan is a podcast produced by The Current which is owned and operated by The Trade Desk, Inc. Learn more: https://www.thecurrent.com/
Sincera was acquired by The Trade Desk, Inc.