WPP chief executive Cindy Rose has said the UK agency group has “recently” stopped using LiveRamp following its upcoming purchase by rival Publicis Groupe. She confirmed WPP was no longer planning to use LiveRamp, when asked in an interview at Campaign House in Cannes with Campaign UK’s editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier. Pressed on whether WPP’s withdrawal from the data collaboration platform was related to the purchase, she said: “What do you think? Next question.”It is thought WPP has not yet come off LiveRamp entirely but a process is under way.Publicis’ planned $2.2bn deal has already faced pushback from rivals Omnicom and Stagwell, which questioned the future independence of the platform and expressed concerns about “data neutrality”. Omnicom has since accelerated its already planned withdrawal from LiveRamp, which was once dubbed the “Switzerland of data”. WPP has its own data collaboration platform, InfoSum, which the agency group acquired last year, but some of its clients have also used LiveRamp.Following Rose’s session, Publicis chief executive Arthur Sadoun took part in a separate interview at Campaign House, where he said he would not comment directly on LiveRamp, because of the ongoing takeover process, or any decision by WPP. However, he said that “every client can do whatever they want”.Sadoun said industry questions about LiveRamp’s future independence under Publicis were “fair” but maintained the “tech, by design, is independent”. He revealed that before making an offer on LiveRamp, the French agency group waited for WPP’s investor day and Omnicom’s $5bn share repurchase announcement.He said that as Publicis saw its competition “double down on share buybacks, cost-cutting and selling assets”, it instead focused on the long term and to “create value” in the long run.“We won't squeeze to please Wall Street,” he said, repeating a message from his Q1 results, before the LiveRamp move.During Rose's interview, she discussed how WPP will be focused on the importance of trust at Cannes, as part of its transition from a holding company to a “trusted growth partner”, and she outlined five trust principles.They include allowing clients to control and own their data, and that “consumers are people, not IDs”, in what appeared to be a tacit contrast to some of its main competitors, including Publicis and Omnicom. She insisted she didn’t want to criticise other agency groups, but was focused on WPP’s own strategy.Rose also spoke about not “locking” clients in, impressing that its agentic platform, WPP Open, is “open by design”. She said: “We never ask [clients] to send data to us or move data or share data; there's nothing to lock into. It's yours, all of your data, all of your insights. That is a client source of asymmetric competitive advantage, and we think it should stay that way.”The final two principles were that AI augments human creativity, doesn’t replace it, and that WPP “takes accountability for driving clients' growth”, tying remuneration to client growth.Sadoun rejected any suggestion that Publicis sought to “lock in” clients. “Of course not,” he told the audience at Campaign House. “I don't think we have to demonstrate in any way that trust and transparency is at the heart of everything we do,” Sadoun added, pointing to the group's performance and client wins and retentions as evidence of trust.He claimed it was a “joke” for WPP to talk about “transparency” at Cannes, given an historic bribery case involving its Chinese media operation. Rose had acknowledged the Chinese case, which occured before she was CEO, saying “we're not going to be perfect all the time” and she had now introduced the five trust principles. WPP had no further comment.This story first appeared on Campaign UK.