The Maze:
Publicis Groupe, the French advertising group, completed its purchase of LiveRamp on November 2 in a cash deal valued at about US$2.2 billion. LiveRamp connects customer records across companies so advertisers can find audiences and measure campaigns. Brands and rival agencies that already use it now rely on a service owned by a company that also competes for their advertising business.
The Details:
How a retailer connects an ad to a sale. A retailer may know who bought something through its loyalty program, while a media partner knows who saw an ad. With permission and a supported connection, LiveRamp can match identifiers such as email addresses to coded records. The retailer and media partner can then compare which matched ad viewers went on to buy. That tells them how often the same people appear in both sets of records. They would still need a way to isolate the effect of the ad to tell whether it caused more sales. Publicis says combining LiveRamp’s partner connections with Epsilon, its audience-data business, will make this kind of work easier for clients to set up. The closing announcement did not report results for the combined offer.
US safeguards keep standalone access open. An interim order from the US Federal Trade Commission, a competition regulator, requires equivalent terms for similarly situated customers of LiveRamp’s US services. Buyers can use standalone LiveRamp without buying other Publicis services, and LiveRamp must keep supporting connections to third-party tools on fair terms. The order restricts Publicis’s access to customer data, with exceptions including explicit customer permission. It calls for independent audits every six months for the first two years after closing, then annually. Publicis can still develop new joint products with LiveRamp. The separate proposed five-year order was still awaiting final approval, with public comments due November 23.
Rival agencies have different options. Digiday reported that Havas expected to keep using LiveRamp, while other agencies have their own tools. WPP has InfoSum, which helps companies compare data, and Omnicom’s Acxiom has been developing an alternative for matching customer records. Moving takes more than signing a new contract. The replacement has to connect to the specific ad platforms and retailers a brand uses, and it has to match enough of the same records for the brand to compare campaign results. A tool that works well for a buyer in one country may have different partner coverage elsewhere.
MarketMaze Take:
Publicis can gain an edge by making its combined service easier to buy, even while rivals retain access to standalone LiveRamp. The bundle only has to spare a buyer enough setup work to make staying with one supplier attractive. A brand that wants a meaningful choice at renewal should test another provider on one campaign using the same audience, partners and definition of a sale. That comparison can reveal whether a move would change who the brand can reach or how many of its sales it can connect to ad views. The safeguards protect access in the US. The test tells the buyer what an alternative is worth in each market.
Sources: Digiday · Publicis Groupe · LiveRamp · FTC interim order · Federal Register
