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 (00:05:03). 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 (00:16:35).
The aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft closed in weeks after Google bought DoubleClick (00:30:55). 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) (00:41:53). The same logic drove the Acxiom services spinoff and guides his acquisition playbook (00:53:31).
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
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Sincera was acquired by The Trade Desk, Inc.