The ink was barely dry on Publicis Groupe’s deal to acquire LiveRamp before marketers started calling their partners and consultants. Not to make decisions — most aren’t there yet. Just to ask questions they hadn’t thought to ask before.
The first and most obvious question is whether LiveRamp will stay neutral. It’s a reasonable thing to wonder. It’s also, according to several ad execs, largely an agency concern dressed up as a marketer one.
Neutrality was always fragile
For them, the service is the service. Who owns the infrastructure matters less than whether it keeps working. The neutrality anxiety sits higher up the chain, with the agencies that compete against Publicis for business and have spent years routing their clients’ first-party data through a platform that now sits inside a rival’s house. There, the fear isn’t that Publicis will raid the data. It’s that a competitor now owns the infrastructure they’ve spent years depending on.
Ron Amram, an industry consultant who previously held leadership roles in in-house media teams at companies including Heineken and Mars, said the acquisition effectively crystallizes a debate the industry has been circling around for years: whether a truly “neutral middle” in advertising technology still exists at all. “There’s been a lot of talk about the neutral middle,” he told Digiday, adding that the $2.2 proposed purchase of LiveRamp by Publicis underlines the question, “Does it exist anymore?”
