• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Whenever a holding company acquires an independent data asset, assurances of neutrality are announced quickly: The platform will be staying neutral. Access will remain open. Competitive agencies and holding companies have nothing to worry about.

For a while, this is true, but the market doesn’t wait to see if the company breaks the rules. Agencies just quietly start routing around the asset and looking for alternatives.

Publicis bought LiveRamp for $2.2 billion. The assurances have already arrived, but once again, I don’t believe the agencies will wait to see if LiveRamp holds up its end of the bargain.  The nature of competition is too strong and too deeply ingrained.

Here’s what I think happens next.

LiveRamp’s revenue is going to start declining, and it’s going to happen faster than most people expect. Not because Publicis will do anything wrong. Not because LiveRamp will suddenly start favoring Publicis clients in its data matching or restricting access to competitors. It will happen because no agency CFO at WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu, Havas, or Stagwell is going to let a meaningful line item sit on the books for a platform their biggest competitor now owns.

It’s not basic paranoia. It’s the logic of an active procurement team.

This opens a string of opportunities that will impact the data landscape over the next 12 months.

The first is media curation. The agencies and brands that need to manage audiences and deal IDs across the open web don’t actually need a neutral third-party intermediary to do it. They need tighter supply paths, better deal-level data, and more control over what they’re buying. Curation delivers that, and the market has already been moving in this direction. Publishers, supply-side platforms, and buyers are all leaning into deal ID-based structures precisely because they provide the data precision and supply-chain transparency that the open auction never could.

What LiveRamp’s disruption accelerates is the shift of data management into the deal itself. Instead of relying on a platform sitting between the agency and the publisher to handle identity and audience matching, curation moves that work closer to the transaction.

The agencies that build or deepen curation capabilities are the ones that will be least exposed when LiveRamp’s neutrality becomes a quarterly conversation with their CFO. Curation isn’t just a media quality play. In a post-LiveRamp-acquisition world, it becomes a data independence play.

The second thing that will happen: The walled gardens win again.

Meta, Google, Amazon, and the major retail media networks have never needed LiveRamp the way the open web does. They have their own closed data ecosystems, identity resolution, and clean room infrastructure and measurement. Google’s Ads Data Hub, Amazon’s AMC, and the publisher-native clean rooms that have proliferated across retail media are all self-contained. When a brand wants privacy-safe data collaboration within those walls, they don’t need a neutral intermediary, as the closed ecosystem handles it directly through clean rooms and private marketplace deals.

The disruption to the neutral open web data layer makes those closed environments comparatively more attractive, not less. If you are a brand that was already spending heavily in walled gardens, the argument for going deeper just got stronger.

The open web’s shared infrastructure is in flux. The closed ecosystems are not. For brands that have been sitting on the fence about committing more budget to retail media or social platforms, this is one more reason the fence leans toward the walled garden.

Thirdly, there is an opportunity for the rest of the non-advertising native data platforms to come in and take over the independent model.  Companies like Snowflake, Databricks, and others can enter the space, set up shop, and take over some of that formerly independent opportunity.  There’s even a window for some new startups to come in and play.  It’s the Wild West of data all over again!

While Publicis clients will benefit, it remains to be seen how the rest of the web will respond.  The dust is going to settle quickly, and some new infrastructure will be in place.  I give it six months.