Signal Break:The Real Take on the LiveRamp Acquisition by Publicis Groupe
- 6 days ago
- 28 min read
The independent infrastructure era may be ending. In this "Signal Break," we unpack one of the most consequential AdTech deals in years: Publicis Groupeacquiring LiveRamp.
Joined by Bob Walczak and Krish Raja, we break down what this deal really means for identity, clean rooms, publishers, UID2, systems integrators, and the future of the open internet.
* Is this the end of “neutral” identity infrastructure?
* Are HoldCos becoming walled gardens?
* Does agentic AI accelerate consolidation—or make it obsolete?
We get into all of it. This is the first official Signal Break: rapid-response episodes covering the biggest shifts happening across AdTech, AI, media, and infrastructure in real time. Enjoy!
Watch the full episode and join the conversation.
🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters
Read the full transcript below
Brett House (00:02)
Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal of Noise. This is Brett House joined by my co-host Rio Longacre. We're doing a little ⁓ thing that we're going to call Signal Break, which is breaking news in the industry. ⁓ There's a topic that everybody's been paying a lot of attention to in the ad tech, mart tech, data tech world, the live ramp acquisition by publicists. We're joined by...
Rio (00:24)
That's all I've been hearing this
week, House. Go to LinkedIn, that's it. Yeah.
Brett House (00:27)
Yeah. Yeah.
And so we're joined by Bob Walczak, the CEO of Mad Connect, Krish Rajah, the CEO and founder of MindMaker AI and an executive contributor ⁓ and content producer for Signal & Noise. He's very involved on the applied AI topics.
Rio (00:45)
He was with us at possible.
Krish (00:48)
It's great to be back with you guys as always.
Rio (00:48)
A lot of great sessions and I know Chris, have a couple of your own sessions coming up soon too. So we're stoked about your continued collaboration, Christian. Bob, always good to see you. We know we can always count on you for some in depth and pointed analysis.
Brett House (00:52)
Yes, always a pleasure.
Some hot takes.
Bob Walczak (01:02)
Heh.
Brett House (01:04)
Yeah. So. Yeah. so and so just to establish the ground the audience for those that have been living in a cave for the last couple of days that may not be fully aware of some of the details around the deal. was an all cat publicist group bought live ramp is on the New York Stock Exchange under ramp and an all cash deal valued at about two point five billion dollars. ⁓ Two point two. OK.
Bob Walczak (01:05)
Yeah, thanks very much for opportunity, guys. Good, glad to be here.
Rio (01:27)
There's 2.2, something like that, Yeah.
Krish (01:29)
Thank you.
Brett House (01:30)
There we go. That's what I've got. know, LiveRamp becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Publicis and they will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange is what I've heard.
Rio (01:41)
Let's
talk to go up about 30%, which is kind of nice if you had any.
Brett House (01:44)
Yeah. And for those of not intimately aware of what LiveRamp does, they have the ramp ID, which we'll talk about. They have a data collaboration solution, what's also known as data onboarding, where they're matching data from multiple sources for use in programmatic and digital advertising and some other AI tools. They'll be integrated into Publis' broader data and identity stack, which has grown a lot in the last few years with acquisitions of Epsilon.
which was sort of an identity plus CRM data play, Lodemy, is data management platform, Citrusab for retail media, Profitero for commerce analytics, and now LiveRamp.
Rio (02:24)
Captivate and Mars Commerce, yeah, they've been doing a bunch of acquisitions. They've been very busy over the last few years, no doubt.
Brett House (02:30)
So arguably, and Bob and I'd love to hear your perspective, this is one of the most consequential data infrastructure deals maybe of the last decade. And I had some questions that I wanted to throw out the group and then I'll let you guys give perspectives on this. Coming from Newstar, in my past, we certainly had very strong perspectives, being sort of the redheaded stepchild of the data onboarding and data matching and identity resolution space. But here's some of my questions that I was thinking about. Does this mark the end of neutral identity infrastructure?
Will holding companies now race to vertically integrate ⁓ identity rails? ⁓ Is this a defensive consolidation before AI agents disintermediate identity layers entirely? There was a lot of talk from ⁓ Scott Howe and others about
Rio (03:15)
Well, yeah, the press
release, it said it was about agentic AI. didn't, any of the things you just mentioned, bread, collaboration, ramp ID, those are kind of just mentioned as afterthoughts, right? So.
Brett House (03:19)
Yeah.
which yeah,
which is like it's a defensive layer to prevent disintermediation knowing that these things are going to go away. So is that that's a good question, I think, to answer. And then does this accelerate warehouse native identity models? ⁓ So, Bob, I think I want to start with you. What's your perspective and what have you been hearing?
Bob Walczak (03:45)
I think this is a very disruptive acquisition. The whole ecosystem is intertwined on this one. The impact is going to be far spread across the world. think everyone's going to be trying to figure out how to essentially address this change. Whether you're going to stick with the relationship, if you're going to have to switch up and build your own...
identity data and onboarding and connectivity strategy. All those pieces kind of come into play now for everyone to think through. So I think it's very disruptive. It's a large shift. The conversation is wide reaching online as to what the impact will be. ⁓ The one thing I can.
you clearly say is I don't, think it takes them off the map from being a neutral player anymore. Once they're owned by a major holding company, neutrality is gone. ⁓ you know,
Rio (04:45)
I've heard them referred to as
Brett House (04:45)
Despite their claims
Rio (04:46)
Switzerland
Brett House (04:46)
otherwise.
Rio (04:46)
many times by people, right? So like they're not Switzerland anymore, right? Yeah.
Bob Walczak (04:48)
A Switchling got acquired.
Brett House (04:51)
Yeah, despite their claims of
Krish (04:51)
Switzerland's on
Bob Walczak (04:52)
That's right.
Krish (04:52)
the payroll.
Brett House (04:52)
otherwise, I think they you know, yeah, you want to protect your current existing client base and partner base. And so they came out and publicly said this is a neutral, we're going to remain neutral. ⁓ And I think the industry largely called bullshit on that.
Bob Walczak (05:09)
Yeah, I look, I think the industry definitely did and it is true to that extent. also think like with a comparison of end-to-end infrastructure like Google, right? Like, you know, they're grading their own homework, they own the supply, the demand, the data, all the components in between. it is, you know, I think you want to own, you know, your entire infrastructure from, you know, brands, dollars to...
you know, spend on media and ⁓ they've done that. And I think that's a, that's a big shift for the market because a lot of other companies have used them as a neutral player to the benefit of their brands. And now you have to.
Rio (05:49)
It's kind of like publicist is
building a walled garden to your point, Bob. It kind of resembles that,
Brett House (05:53)
Yeah.
Bob Walczak (05:54)
Yeah,
Brett House (05:55)
Yeah.
Bob Walczak (05:55)
but that's the direction of the whole ecosystem, right? Like don't think, like, you know, the biggest players in the ecosystem are the Metas and Googles and the walled gardens. And this is, you know, this is another one being formed by an agency. The agency business model is changing. It's no longer can be FTE with AI. And now they're becoming tech companies and walled gardens to, A, compete with the walled gardens and B,
Brett House (06:13)
Yeah.
Bob Walczak (06:20)
leverage their, create leverage in the ecosystem for the relationships they have with the brand. So it's a,
Brett House (06:26)
Yeah. And they have
to have other ways to add value too. And we talked about a lot of this on signal and noises is being principle based media buyers ⁓ isn't enough. There's too little margin. It's too commoditized. And they've got to kind of move up the value chain in terms of what they're offering.
Rio (06:40)
Well, margins are falling in
media everywhere with calls for more transparency. And publicists has really, they have been at the forefront of principle-based media, principle-based buying, right? They really have done a lot of that. And I think that's helped them in a lot of ways the last couple of years.
Brett House (06:57)
Yeah. So Rio, what's your take? know that there was a lot of perspectives within Omnicom. guys put out some stuff publicly. You published some stuff to LinkedIn, and you and I had a conversation with Scott Brinker yesterday at Lank that we were about an hour and a half in, and he said, I want to talk to you more. We had turned off the record button on Riverside, and then we had a 20-minute conversation about LiveRamp.
Bob Walczak (06:57)
Absolutely.
Rio (07:19)
Yeah. About this. Yeah.
Brett House (07:23)
which she didn't add a ton of detail, but Rio and I were just kind of going off the rails in our own way. But Rio, I'd love you to share some of those perspectives.
Rio (07:30)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. This was, Brett, if you recall at CES earlier this year and first week of January, I think Bob, we were actually having dinner together when the rumors started circulating that this actually had happened. I remember running into, you know, texted few people. knew it live, ramped in here back, ran into Dave Rifkin, who ran the hold code business for them at the chandelier bar. And he said, no, it's not true. It hasn't happened, but we have, we are, we have a deal we've announced with them. And then apparently this had been working in the background for some time.
Bob Walczak (07:43)
That's right.
Brett House (07:45)
Yep.
Rio (07:59)
I and then suddenly over the weekend, it's funny, they announced it on a Sunday when the exchange was closed and obviously it was a Sunday and this was announced. So I talked to a bunch of people and look, I have long-term relationship with people at LiveRamp. I Dave Eisenberg, Chief Strategy Officer, I consider him a good friend, great person. And like, you know, I know their partner team, Fenn, really, really well work with them for about a decade. Great people. And I've really enjoyed working with them, but I spoke with some people.
right after the acquisition was announced. And the first thing they said was, well, we want to continue working together with all the holdcosers. We've been assured we're going to be independent. But Brett, to your point and Bob echoing what you said earlier, I mean, is that even possible? mean, let's face it, Pueblo says really is kind of building their own walled garden. It's like an integrated ecosystem that combines data, clean rooms, commerce, creator marketing, media execution, all the things they now have right under one roof. And I wasn't, and I basically told Ivram, Hey, listen, I
going to wait until I hear what, what the strategy is here. This, this holding company, I'm not sure. And then lo and behold, the next day, this is a Digi-Day exclusive. Apparently John Wren said, and I quote, is reading from Digi-Day's article that changed yesterday afternoon. Wren said, I moved the drop dead date yesterday, a year from now when we'll be completely separated, completely separated from live ramp, even if we have to invest a little money to honor our contract for balance of the year, the contract being
Omni-com pit. Yep. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Omni-com pays $50 million a year to live ramp for data. then live ramp pays it 50 million back actually to Axiom for different services. it is a terms of trade. Like it zeros out, but it's $50 million in our balance sheet. Right. Apparently that ends that, you know, like Omni-com is cutting the cord and I imagine other holding companies are going to do the same thing. I mean, you think about it. Would you want to be paying your competitor? I mean, that's, number one, and also like
Bob Walczak (09:26)
It to 18, I think.
Krish (09:28)
Mm.
Rio (09:54)
for any clients using that competitor, well, not using live or now they're your competitors clients. There's nothing to stop the live that, the, you know, the executive team there from looking through our client roster and saying, okay, let's look at all the WPP, all the Omni-Com, all the Havas clients. Let's maybe offer them a sweet deal. they, if they, if they move the media business over to us, maybe we hug their, I don't know. So I think there's just going to be, mean, my, my initial guess was 15 to 20 % of the business probably evaporates immediately. I mean, you think the live ramp was like 800.
Krish (10:10)
and.
Rio (10:23)
$30 million business at a very high margin. And I think the expectation was they were buying 85%. Well, the expectation was they were buying that revenue, that top line revenue, right? My guess is 15, 20 % minimum disappears right away. So I don't know, if they really were expecting to retain most of it, I don't see how that happens. I don't know if anyone else has thoughts about that. Krish, maybe.
Brett House (10:27)
85 % margins is what I've heard, yeah.
Bob Walczak (10:45)
Well, yeah,
Krish (10:45)
Yeah, I
mean.
Bob Walczak (10:46)
I, I, go ahead, Chris,
Krish (10:49)
No, no, I was just going to say I totally agree that it's, you know, the press releases can say one thing, the antitrust lawyers can say, you know, it's one thing, but data speaks, money speaks. Those are the two sort of forces that sit on the other side, which is when you've got data as control and that's just in the old world and not even in the world of AI.
But also, yeah, I can kind of see that playing out real well. It's like almost a cold war of migration beginning. yeah, you don't buy a $2.2 billion company and not by the customers, not by the revenue, not by the access to that. It would be ridiculous not to.
Brett House (11:33)
Yeah. And the margin,
and the gross margin for a business that's under a lot of margin pressure.
Bob Walczak (11:39)
Yeah, but I mean, look, this wasn't, you know, buying revenue and market cap. I think this was, you know, a strategic acquisition. This is, you know, incrementally valuable. And the fact that it's disruptive to the rest of the ecosystem is a positive for people, it's not a negative. You know, if they lose some customers and some margin, you know, I think they have to kind of say, be it. I think they're going to make it back in other areas because they're going to be weakening their competitors.
And it's you know, whether you like it or not, it's just the case right and it's to the same point where you know live ramp and You publicists can say that they're gonna maintain neutrality. We can all say that's not true either You know, it's like, know the positionings the positioning what what's happening in reality on the ground is very much different And what I would like to say I like start out at least by saying is, you know Congratulations to Dave Eisenberg and the team at live ramp for getting the transaction complete
Rio (12:32)
Yeah, good for them.
Krish (12:35)
Each
Bob Walczak (12:36)
We know that they've been working on that and that's to your point Rio Bax and CES, we've been hearing the rumors of it. So I think that's great. Adam Salomon's a good friend over there as well. think those guys are, yeah, they've made a significant move here and I think they're doing something that's unique. So I think it's gonna be disruptive. I think we'll see what comes out in the wash because of this, but it's certainly.
Rio (12:46)
He just joined recently, yeah.
Bob Walczak (13:04)
you know, an exciting, you know, transaction and something that is, you know, we haven't seen in our industry in quite a while.
Brett House (13:11)
Well, so let's let's let's interrogate that. want to tell you that. So you're saying this is an offensive move versus a defensive consolidation play, right?
Rio (13:18)
Well, I...
Bob Walczak (13:18)
Absolutely. mean, Pulp
Assist technically is the largest holding company in the world right now. they're now stepping on the gas to get further ahead. I can't see this as being anything other than offensive. It's like...
Brett House (13:24)
Yeah.
but.
Rio (13:34)
Yeah. But it's offensive, but you think what are they actually buying? I guess that's the real question. mean, yeah, I'm just overlooking whole agentic thing. mean, yeah, you need the data layer, need a lot of the signals in order to actually build, I guess, better AI models and better agents. Fair enough. But like LiveRant was not a leader in AI. Let's let's admit it. know, like 99 % of the revenue is their legacy services, but you listed them out, data onboarding, identity resolution.
Brett House (13:34)
But if we see the...
Yeah, that's really what I want to get to.
Which is, yep.
Rio (14:03)
They acquired Haboo for $200 million a couple of years ago and Haboo team, great people love them, but let's face it, data clean rooms have not been a big business. I think it's a critical part of infrastructure, but it's not like you can chart.
Bob Walczak (14:14)
No, no, hold on,
hold on, the missing piece of what you're saying is connectivity. They bought the pipes. like, I know this is self-serving because of what MagConnect does as a business, but I mean, it's a fact. The owning the pipes and the connectivity is critical because agents can't act unless they're connected. And frankly, from a strategic position, as much as we want to talk about this, when we talk about the neutrality aspect here.
Rio (14:21)
That's it.
Brett House (14:22)
with hap- with hap-
Rio (14:25)
Right.
Bob Walczak (14:41)
When you know what's going through the pipes and who's activating where and what campaigns are running where, it can be anonymized as much as you want to say that is, but the reality is, you know what customers are doing, what business where. And those only those pipes is strategic.
Rio (14:53)
Yep. Yeah, Bob, 25,000 publishers,
Brett House (14:56)
Yeah,
Rio (14:57)
25,000
Brett House (14:57)
yeah, so that's
Rio (14:58)
publishers. Like they're the pipes. They have the pipes built to 25,000 publishers right now. That is huge.
Bob Walczak (15:02)
That's strategic.
Brett House (15:02)
Yeah,
that's the remote, but there's also an argument that LiveRamp has outside of building that 25,000 publisher ecosystem. They haven't evolved to Rio's point since the earliest days of data onboarding. so is there an argument that data onboarding is going to be defunct, ⁓ which is at some point.
Bob Walczak (15:26)
No, mean, they, a second, they've
completely evolved. They've added Haboo, so they're making a move to get into, you know, to have zero transfer data model, right? So essentially being able to, you know, access data where it rests and not have to move it, right? And so I've made the point that, you know, they have a central serving model and that they're, ⁓ you know, that model's defunct in a future scenario where, you know, you need to be privacy safe and secure, but, you know,
Brett House (15:41)
Yep.
Bob Walczak (15:56)
not thinking about through the point of the hub acquisition, which a, it costs their clients a little bit more to now you be forced to be licensed a clean room to be able to make that connection so the data doesn't move. But it's the security value to them that makes sense in some economic sense. you know, they're, they're evolving their strategy. I would just say like, I'm not like, I think they're, you know, they're like every big organization that is taking a long time to get it done. And I think that's, know, that's because there's bigger
big pieces to move and make happen. ⁓
Brett House (16:26)
But
so a question to you, Haboo had what, $14 million in revenue, $18 million in revenue, right? They were very small. Is there an argument that cleaning room functionality has been leapfrogged by native warehouse players? Right, the data breaks.
Rio (16:33)
It was between 10 and 20 million when the acquisition happened.
Bob Walczak (16:43)
Well, sure.
We firmly believe in being deployed locally inside the client environment. And I think while clean rooms get you closer, it's still not 100 % that way. And so there's still inefficiencies there and security risks. Not necessarily with the Haboo tech, but the fact that you're using a pipe to connect in and out or a clean room to connect in and out rather than having...
Brett House (16:50)
Yeah.
Bob Walczak (17:11)
everything stored locally where it's secured inside of your environment. So there's, there's pluses and minuses to that, but it's, they've made a move in that direction. And I think, I think honestly, if your, your model had been a central on onboarding model, and now you're trying to figure out how to adapt that to a future state where everyone's deploying locally inside the cloud, then the hot lose the right decision from a strategic perspective. I think it's, I, you know,
Krish (17:15)
Thank
Brett House (17:37)
Did they
implement, did they integrate the pipes? Because I've talked to some product leaders. I will name them. Steve Silver's at, who's now at guideline.ai, but he was at Newstar. And he said that it was more of like a workflow tool versus a true clean room pipes environment. he said he had been fully, he had fully demoed it and used it or gotten into it ⁓ and thought of it less as like pipe advantage and more of like workflow advantage. So, I mean, do know the details of how it was integrated into the?
LiveRamp stack.
Bob Walczak (18:09)
I don't have a clear view of that. I think the point here is that when they talk about AI in this scenario, you're talking about the significant need for connectivity to make that work. I think this is going to rapidly shift the ecosystem into
Brett House (18:28)
Yep.
Bob Walczak (18:35)
I guess one of the big points that was made in the transaction as well is that there's a trillion dollar transformation business out there. And I made this point before in other conversations that I think that, know, strategically, you know, how you're deployed is going to be critical, right? And I think that some of the assets that both Kubasis and Omnicom have with Sapient and Cordera is that those companies are going to now be in higher demand to be able to go.
help these brands transform into an AI error. And if you have a tool set, you can then go plug into the company and say, here, we're going to AI enable you, and here's your pipes to deal with orchestration, and here's your data assets to be able to do enrichment and onboarding. you're essentially implementing a stack. Again, moving them to a tech company and a walled garden versus being a traditional FTE model, I think there's a huge opportunity here. And I also think,
Krish (19:18)
Thank
Thank
Bob Walczak (19:31)
This is not unique to Puvosys. The OmniCom and WPP and other agencies are building tech stacks and I think they have to make an architectural decision on how that's deployed because it's going to be critical again for how it's adopted.
Brett House (19:41)
Yep.
Rio (19:49)
Yeah, Bob, that's a really interesting point you brought up. you go first and I'll jump in.
Krish (19:49)
Yeah, I think it's a...
No, no, you go, you go.
Rio (19:54)
Okay. I mean, I guess quick point here. mean, Bob, I really like what you said about the kind of the systems integration and service layer that sits on top of that. looking, looking at live ramp, right? I mean, I, I've always felt, mean, I look at this is the space I worked in, right? mean, it's about like, look at live ramp, like I always felt they were undervalued. When you look at the 25,000 publishers, the fact that ramp ID is ubiquitous, it's really the, the identity spine of the open web in a lot of ways. Right.
Brett House (20:05)
sure you do, Rio.
Rio (20:21)
Um, you look at how much is used. mean, people don't even realize the trade desk UID too, uses ramp ID in order to actually like, uh, improve its matching. it's, it's used everywhere, right? There are ubiquitous, but they're only at $800 million company, right? So always felt they were undervalued. And I think a big reason for that was they didn't rely on really any scale delivery from systems integrators in a meaningful way. Right. I mean, I've worked with them over the years, but they were never, you know, they always had a pros professional services or pro serve team that was.
always super busy, never had capacity. And I always felt that limited their ability to really scale up. Cause in order, it's one thing to have a clean room, to have the pipes, to have, to have ramp ID and all these. But if you can't really deploy these in these very, in, in cloud environments, build the pipes, connect things, it's not easy, right? You need, you need a lot of skilled practitioners who understand cloud, who understand data transformation and integration, all these things. And, and I mean, it's, takes a lot, right? I always felt that was a big limiting factor for them. Now the question is.
Now that they're part of publicists, okay, you've got Sapient there. You've got a very strong like systems integration and consultancy, but LiveRamp struggled to do this. I know they were doing some testing with, I think it was with Capgemini recently, but it's not like they're big, like they do a ton of work with Accenture Deloitte, any of the big SIs, which I think if they could have, they could have been two or three X the size. So the question is, they change their behavior?
Bob Walczak (21:44)
That gives them room to grow.
Rio (21:45)
Can they change their behavior? But now it's Sapient or nothing, right? If they can't make it work with Sapient, no one, mean, if you're Accenture Deloitte, are you gonna work with them? I don't know. I mean, I think that's a big question mark. So I think this, if they can unlock it with Sapient, it could be great for them, right? Because I mean, look, being a Carrera, we're doing, go ahead.
Bob Walczak (22:00)
I
don't think that locks them into Sapient. do think others, I think if they create the right model, you know, the overflow can go to other big systems integrators ⁓ that already have the deep relationship with the brands and they let the brand select what system integrator they want to use. There's no downside as long as their tech gets deployed. The value prop is the tech getting deployed and you getting wider reach with that.
Rio (22:05)
You don't think so?
Bob Walczak (22:29)
The systems integrator is a services business that certainly provides value. I think it's a strategic moat in this scenario, but it's, you know, again, the market's moving away from services businesses and AI is automating everything. you're going to, it's just a matter of that deployment. if they can, their challenge is the architecture of their system and can it be deployed properly? And ⁓ you know,
What are they going to change about that? And those are product questions, right? Like this to me is interesting in the sense from a product lens, like what's the strategy for a deployment model? Is that just hub-oo or there's going to be other opportunities there to do that? And I'm sure you're to think it through.
Rio (23:15)
But you still need architects, Bob,
you still need architects to help like think this through, understand where the connection points are. Right. I mean, like you need, I mean, you need that you basically need this skilled expertise from the SI world. Right. So I mean, I don't know, like maybe you're right. Maybe, maybe, maybe it doesn't preclude them from working at big eyes size, but also, you know, like, but, I think it could be limiting factor. know Chris, I know we cut you off. So why don't you jump in and, and let us know what you're thinking.
Bob Walczak (23:21)
Sure.
Absolutely.
Krish (23:37)
I don't
know. No, I don't think that they'll pick one lane or the other. I think that they'll hedge their bets on how they deploy, you know, in the short term specifically, particularly. But I think, yeah, think Sapien and Marcel will probably sort of pince to the two Epsilon and live ramp. that, you know, like you said, Rio, ramp ID becomes the Epsilon plus publicist ID, right? It's not the industry ID. So kind of what you...
mentioned it sort of feels like a real sort of not death. No, it's a maybe over dramatizing it, but it feels like a real structural shift in the entire industry as opposed to, it's like another acquisition. bought this company. And as usual, who suffers in this moment is probably the open web, right? The open web publishers, those who have sort of made their wedge in that space.
And the measurement layer that everyone sort of used to think about and trust is almost balkanized, I guess is the right word, into holdco stacks. ⁓ so that, you know, it's one way of looking at it, but I think, I just don't think that each agency will take the, you know, the same approach. I think you'll see these five big holdcos look so different to one another ⁓ compared to what they've looked like in the last 10 years.
Bob Walczak (25:03)
Totally.
But think if you go back to the 25,000 media providers that LiveRamp is connected to, think that, ⁓ well, two functions there. One is like great news if you're looking for all your spend to come from publicists, bad news if you're looking to get more spend out of the competitors. But I think that ⁓ for a period of time, it's certainly going to open up opportunity for those media providers to be able to get some good revenue out of this deal. ⁓ I think that
Brett House (25:11)
Yep.
Bob Walczak (25:36)
I also think with agentic buying and the future that holds, there's an opportunity to be able to open up lots of pockets of inventory ⁓ with direct buys and using the data capability and identity capability of live ramp to be able to ⁓ bring your strategy to that media provider, which doesn't require as much of a DSP as you can plug that into the SSP or ad server and get the value.
Krish (26:00)
Yeah, that's.
Rio (26:03)
No.
Krish (26:04)
Yeah, that I
think I think that's actually kind of an understated benefit really is I kind of think about, you know, the from an economics point of view, what happens when things sort of bifurcate like one goes to that side and the other goes to that side. You've got open web contextual ad CP sort of led buying and then all of a sudden I feel like when you can get address ability and high quality address ability at that, I feel like
that ends up having a premium in a world of agentic buying if you can have that signal. I think the value of that signal, cost per signal, whatever you want to call it, would increase drastically over the next year or two. And advertisers will seek that. It's a great selling point for sure.
Bob Walczak (26:53)
Yeah, agreed.
Rio (26:54)
Yeah, I think it continued, I think it's going to be a bifurcation. We talked about this, Brett, the one with Joe Root recently, right? A bifurcation where the premium publishers push everyone for authentication to log in, And then, Bob's your point about agentic buying or agentic trading, that does start happening at scale. It's not really happening yet, right? I think there's some, I know there's some experimentation. got, but I'm become more experimenting, right?
Bob Walczak (27:16)
You got some distance there.
Rio (27:18)
Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, in theory, right, you can do it. Maybe, maybe start to cut out some parts of ad tech, right? Maybe you go straight SSP to, to, to Dubai, or maybe you go, maybe you go DSP straight to publisher. don't know. Like, or maybe, maybe, maybe just have agents dealing with agents. Right. But then how do you bid? Is it an auction anymore? I don't know. Maybe everything just goes direct sales deals. Right. And then how do you price things? There's a lot of questions and
Brett House (27:38)
Yeah.
Krish (27:39)
everyone's
Bob Walczak (27:40)
Well, I think it's going
Krish (27:41)
making
Bob Walczak (27:41)
to start there.
Krish (27:41)
a betting agent right now.
Bob Walczak (27:44)
Yeah, I mean, like there's a lot of, you know, I think you have agentic optimization, you know, you're going to have agentic, you know, buying, you know, you can do, you know, there's, to me, quite a bit of, I think, I don't think programmatic is excluded here. I think, you know, it's just another delivery mechanism and buying mechanism, but you'll use AI for optimization or curation, right? So, and curation plays heavy with the data assets that are now built up inside of
⁓ live ramp in Epsilon.
Rio (28:16)
Yeah, becomes a former curation.
Brett House (28:16)
Yeah, but those data
assets are limited compared to what, from a profiling perspective, compared to what you see on the publisher side, right? Because the publisher ecosystem and the amount of contextual behavioral signal data that they capture and that is not passed through to the ad servers or the DSP pipes because it would just cause increased costs from a compute perspective.
Rio (28:28)
So much signal there.
Krish (28:39)
And I think the publishers
are also looking at identity as infrastructure as well. So they're sort of taking, or they're trying to take the matter into their own hands. And I think that scenario plans for this world where the ramp ideas and the interoperable idea that it used to be, or probably will be, but I think that's kind of also something to take into account that publishers will change how they approach identity.
Brett House (29:09)
Yeah, no, because they have a much richer data source that's not being used in the bid stream. It's not being used in digital advertising and targeting generally, unless it's direct to publisher type deals, which is really what Joe was talking about in our last podcast with him.
Krish (29:22)
Here's a question for the group. And this may sound like an absolute tweet on air, so apologies if I do. Are there any independent data collaboration layers left?
Rio (29:36)
⁓ that was the last big one, right? It was them. I guess there's, what's that? There's an attribution company from Israel. drawing a blank on them. they have an independent clean room. there's couple other smaller ones out there that people are using that ⁓ they're more specialized, like mobile or different. But I don't think there's really a ton of, all of the big...
Brett House (29:39)
Yeah.
Krish (29:39)
Yeah.
Bob Walczak (29:51)
centric.
Krish (30:03)
No. So then
Bob Walczak (30:03)
I think, I mean,
Krish (30:05)
in two years, you think Snowflake or Databricks launch some sort of neutral replacement?
Bob Walczak (30:05)
well, you have Aquifer.
Brett House (30:09)
Aquifer. Yep.
Rio (30:12)
⁓ Well, you have Snowflake, Databricks. So they all have, and then obviously have AWS, right? They've got AWS Cleanroom that, but it's funny. Yeah. But it's funny, and it's funny, like when I was briefing the team here, like following this on Monday, Tuesday, one thing I said is, you know, this makes AWS more important than ever for us, right? Because if that Cleanroom is now off the market, right, and we're to need to deliver, build infrastructure and connect pipes and do all that for clients, then
Bob Walczak (30:18)
Absolutely. I wouldn't call them independent, but...
Brett House (30:20)
Yep.
Krish (30:21)
Yeah.
Brett House (30:22)
Yeah.
Rio (30:42)
⁓ you know, that partnership becomes more important than ever, you know, that, know, their technology was more important. You know, gonna look, we're doing, we're doing this funny clean room business. Maybe it was never a good standalone product business, but it's become like critical infrastructure. Bob, I agree with what you're saying earlier that you really need in a modern kind of, if you want to, if, if you want to be able to have precision advertising, ⁓ you want to have, you want to have cross platform measurement, any of that, you need a clean room.
Brett House (31:04)
Yeah. And you can, and you could build it. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, or you, or you need that sort of native app built, built within a, like a data warehouse environment, like a snowflake or a data that's really functioning is the same, is the same thing, right? To D on to anonymize the data to allow second party data sharing. Uh, but, but do you need, know, isn't that going to live just within the warehouse environments? Right. Isn't that what snowflake and data bricks are sort of pushing towards in AWS and others, right? Why have a separate product that is doing the
Krish (31:14)
Yeah.
Brett House (31:34)
connectivity and linkage when you could basically.
Rio (31:36)
Well, there's something to be
said about it, it's funny. the first clean room work I ever did, it actually was with Snowflake. We built a couple for our media entertainment companies. Like the work it took to actually, this before they acquired Samuha, right? The work it took to actually customize that and deploy was actually, I mean, it was not easy, right? So, I mean, hence the need for these clean rooms where it already was pre-configured. everything, like you had all, I mean, it's really hard to do work in a clean room because of all the...
Brett House (31:53)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (32:05)
of the way it's actually set up on purpose, right? You can't do certain things in order to offer those protections and governance. So there is something to be said about it. And like we're doing more cleaner work now than we ever have for lots of different brands and life sciences and CPG and retail, because in order to do a lot of the things, you really want to activate, mean, it was my hypothesis, but I heard about cleaners six, seven years ago, like data transfer is going to...
Brett House (32:07)
Yeah.
Rio (32:33)
know, really going to stop people and not be uploading stuff to DSPs. Even a lot of like the legacy, like Merkel data business where they're sending, you know, you're uploading files are rich, you know, they're sending it back. So that's all going to happen in clean rooms eventually. That really hasn't happened, but they are, but for, for media and I think advertising use cases that adoption is going up a lot.
Brett House (32:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, the no data movement argument. think we've anything else that anybody wants to share on the topic? I think this is pretty good coverage.
Krish (33:00)
I think just echoing
what Bob said, is I think at the end of the day, if you can control the component parts they're pulling together, which is identity, collaboration, and the agent layer, know, that's been the agentic framing has been the hype. It's, but the structure beneath it. Yeah, the structure beneath it is not hype. It's a way to own the entire AI value chain for the advertisers that they work with and pitch to.
Brett House (33:16)
Yeah.
Bob Walczak (33:17)
and connectivity.
Brett House (33:19)
connectivity.
Bob Walczak (33:31)
I think there's you know, it's exciting times. This is going to shake things up significantly. How the market reacts is going to be very interesting coming over the coming months. There's a lot of opportunity to get it right and wrong.
Rio (33:44)
How much disruption
do you think there'll be, because of this?
Bob Walczak (33:50)
I don't think it's like an overnight change. think it's like John Wren said, now he's accelerated the time to get off the live ramp, right? There's no ability to just turn it off tomorrow. That's not an option. So the change that's gonna happen is gonna be a quick evolution. I think it's gonna be pretty succinct in that sense, and consistent across these hold codes and agencies.
Rio (34:04)
End of year, yep.
Bob Walczak (34:21)
⁓ We're talking 12 months of work at least to be able to make a big change here or come out with an innovation that averts the issue.
Rio (34:32)
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's happened for me, this hammered home, the point that it's very important to own the data and technology assets. I even say it's critical now you see all these acquisitions by this one and others, right? But your real differentiator end of the day is the ability to integrate the kind of like, see what, like what all the whole codes are building, advisory systems, integration, engineering, identity, and media execution, which still is the front door, right? You know, the margins might be lower with that still is a huge part of the, but I think
Brett House (34:55)
Yep.
Rio (35:00)
They get OmniCom is 60 % of the business, John Renz said at Investor's Day. still he's integrating all those things into one operating model, which I think that that's the road everyone is on. So see through that lens, it makes sense what they did and we're going to be continuing to do what we're doing. I think this accelerates some partnerships for us. For example, MedConnect, AWS, other players like that in order to build stuff that is not owned by a competitor. I see that being a big change.
But I think that is clear what the strategy is, but now it comes down to execution.
Brett House (35:32)
Yeah, agencies moving towards becoming product organizations in a lot of ways. Right. That changes the game for sure. Well, thanks everybody for joining me. think that was awesome for our first ⁓ signal break. Right. We'll probably have a lot more of these coming on as these transformations in Jacobs and the industry continue to happen. So for everybody that made it through, well, thanks Bob One and Krish for joining in Rio on a last minute notice. ⁓
Bob Walczak (35:38)
That's right.
Rio (36:00)
Yeah, Bob Lassman
and Chris from London, right? You're over in UK.
Krish (36:03)
I am indeed. Hello from London.
Brett House (36:04)
wow.
Rio (36:04)
Nice.
Brett House (36:05)
Yeah, it's calling in. Yeah. So, yeah, we will. We'll publish this out. You'll you can find this on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast and signal a noise dot a. So thanks everybody and we'll see you next time.
Bob Walczak (36:07)
Thanks for having me.
Krish (36:19)
Thank you.
Bob Walczak (36:19)
Thanks.
Rio (36:20)
slow
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