LiveRamp, the neutral party
Publicis is buying LiveRamp, and at Cannes, the vendors lined up to pitch themselves as the successor, the new neutral party in the data ecosystem, the connective tissue every advertiser routes through, and no one owns. That was the pitch. Neutral was the word.
Then the industry sources explain that the role was never really about being neutral. LiveRamp's advantage was the number of connections and integrations it had built over time. The scale, not the disinterest. Neutral was what you called it in the deck.
Which leaves the successors selling something LiveRamp didn't have either.
Publicis is an advertising holding company. The neutral broker sitting in the middle of everyone's data is being bought by one of the parties it sat between. The neutrality, whatever it was, is not the thing changing hands.
Some challengers aren't trying to rebuild the network at all. Hightouch and others put the activation tools directly inside a client's own cloud warehouse. The data stays where it already lives, gets activated in place, never passes through a third-party ecosystem. Lower cost. More control over the sensitive data. No middle to sit in.
The rest of the field is expected to consolidate. Specialist identity vendors, ID5, MadConnect, get named as the acquisition targets, bought by companies trying to recreate what LiveRamp offered.