Publicis closes LiveRamp acquisition, and some brands say they are jumping ship

Publicis Groupe has completed its acquisition of LiveRamp, the data collaboration platform it agreed to buy in May, and announced the closing on Monday 2 November. The all-cash deal values LiveRamp at a total enterprise value of $2.167bn, or $38.50 a share, according to Publicis’s original announcement. It is the group’s biggest purchase since it paid $4.4bn for Epsilon in 2019, as Adweek reported. Not every LiveRamp customer is happy about the new owner.

What Publicis is buying

Publicis is selling the combination as a plug-and-play AI growth engine that clients own and control. Brands can enrich their first-party data with LiveRamp’s RampID and Epsilon’s identity data, then activate it across LiveRamp’s network of 25,000 publishers, 500 technology and data partners, retail media networks, walled gardens and large language models, as well as Publicis’s own media network, the group said in its closing announcement. LiveRamp will keep running as an independent company, with Scott Howe staying on as chief executive.

The deal closed just over a week after the US Federal Trade Commission cleared it with conditions. Under the consent order, Publicis and LiveRamp must give customers nondiscriminatory access for five years and put up firewalls so Publicis cannot use LiveRamp customers’ data, with an independent auditor checking every six months for two years and then annually for three more, as Marketing Dive reported.

That has not reassured everyone. Benoit Vatere, chief media and digital commerce officer at Liquid Death, warned Publicis and LiveRamp on LinkedIn that the brand would leave, adding: “I am first in line.” The drinks brand confirmed to Marketing Dive that it plans to move away from LiveRamp, while WPP and Omnicom have been winding down their agencies’ use of the platform for months.

Arthur Sadoun, Publicis’s chairman and chief executive, brushed the defections aside. “We are not worried at all about competitors leaving LiveRamp,” he told Adweek, adding that rivals would still be welcome on the platform.

Why it matters

LiveRamp built its business on being the Switzerland of ad tech, a neutral pipe that every agency group, publisher and platform could plug into. Publicis is betting that clients care more about what their data can do than about who owns the pipe, and that one company offering identity, media, consulting and AI agents can beat the walled gardens on control and the consultancies on speed. The deal also lets Publicis lift its 2027 and 2028 targets to 7% to 8% net revenue growth, up from 6% to 7%.

The risk is the one Liquid Death has just made public. A neutral platform is only as valuable as the data its users feed into it, and if rival holding companies and their clients take their data elsewhere, LiveRamp starts to look like a Publicis tool rather than an industry utility. Publicis is already growing faster than its rivals, as its third-quarter results showed, and this deal shows it now competes on technology as much as on agencies. The thing to watch is whether brand defections spread beyond one outspoken marketer, or whether the FTC’s firewalls are enough to keep big advertisers on board.