Publicis Groupe entered into an agreement to acquire LiveRamp on Sunday, the latest in a series of data plays by the advertising giant.
But unlike the acquisition of Epsilon in 2019 and Lotame in 2025, the announcement of the LiveRamp acquisition speaks much more to the potential of agentic AI.
LiveRamp is a data collaboration platform that provides identity resolution, privacy-safe data collaboration, data clean rooms, cross-platform measurement, and first-party data activation. It provides interoperability among clouds, retailers, publishers, and ad platforms, connecting more than 25,000 publisher domains and over 500 technology and data partners.
The shorthand for much of this work is “data co-creation,” which simply means LiveRamp helps companies connect multiple high-value data sources across partners in a secure environment to create new, proprietary data assets.
Proprietary data to power AI agents
As popular LLMs become commoditized, the proprietary data assets companies generate increase in value for those that own them. The goal here is to use anonymized, integrated, dynamic, co-created data to train AI agents to make decisions and respond to users within a defined governance framework.
The trend of advertising agencies buying data platforms kicked into high gear one year ago. WPP bought InfoSum, and Publicis Groupe picked up Lotame.
At Publicis, the Lotame acquisition was an opportunity to expand the company’s data universe. It added a massive identity graph, audience marketplace capabilities, publisher relationships, 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 $38.5 per share (a 29.8% premium based on LiveRamp’s closing share price on May 15, the last trading day prior to the announcement of the agreement).
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 operate as a neutral, interoperable platform and provide open access across the ecosystem. The companies said in a statement that no current or prospective customer will be prohibited from accessing or restricted in using their services.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
The post Publicis buys LiveRamp to build agentic AI capabilities on proprietary data appeared first on MarTech.