Publicis Groupe entered into a deal on Sunday to acquire LiveRamp, the latest in a series of data plays from the advertising giant.
But unlike the acquisition of Epsilon in 2019 and Lotame in 2025, the LiveRamp acquisition announcement speaks much more to the potential of agent AI.
LiveRamp is a data collaboration platform that provides identity resolution, privacy-preserving data collaboration, data clean rooms, cross-platform measurement, and first-party data activation. It provides interoperability across clouds, retailers, publishers and advertising platforms, connecting more than 25,000 publisher domains and more than 500 technology and data partners.
The short term for much of this work is “data co-creation,” which simply means that LiveRamp helps companies connect multiple high-value data sources between partners in a secure environment to create new first-party data assets.
Proprietary data to power AI agents
As popular LLMs become commoditized, proprietary data asset companies generate an increase in value for those who own them. The goal here is to use anonymized, integrated, dynamic, and co-created data to train AI agents to make decisions and respond to users within a defined governance framework.
The trend of ad agencies buying data platforms took off a year ago. WPP bought InfoSum and Publicis Groupe acquired Lotame.
For Publicis, the acquisition of Lotame was an opportunity to expand the company’s data universe. It added a massive identity graph, audience market features, publisher relations, and more.
LiveRamp’s role at Publicis will be to operationalize and activate that expanded universe.
Publicis Groupe will acquire LiveRamp in an all-cash transaction, based on an acquisition price of $38.50 per share (a 29.8% premium based on LiveRamp’s closing share price on May 15, the last trading day before the deal was announced).
LiveRamp will continue to be led by CEO Scott Howe following the acquisition. Howe will report directly to Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun. LiveRamp will continue to function as a neutral and interoperable platform and will provide open access across the entire ecosystem. The companies said in a statement that no current or potential customers will be banned from accessing or limited in their use of their services.
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