DEEPER THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Notes from a former LiveRamper on what Publicis just bought — and the much larger market it leaves behind.
By Eric Shaffer, CEO & Co-Founder, Agnitio
When Publicis announced its $2.2B acquisition of LiveRamp this morning, I had two reactions. The first was the obvious one — a former LiveRamper watching a company that mattered enormously to him get bought by a holding company. The second was the one I want to write about, because nobody in this industry seems willing to say it out loud yet.
LiveRamp is the infrastructure play that is about to leave most of its customers behind.
I do not mean that snarkily. I mean it as a category prediction. And it is the one I have been preparing for at Agnitio for the last two years.
The history rhymes, and the rhyme is short
When TransUnion bought Neustar in 2021, the official line was that Neustar’s identity and DMP capabilities would continue to operate independently to serve the broader market. A few years later, Neustar One was effectively gone. The DMP — gone. The pieces that survived got folded into TransUnion’s stack and stopped functioning as a competitive option for the rest of the industry.
The pattern repeats. When holding companies, identity giants, or measurement leaders buy independent infrastructure, the “we will remain neutral” promise has a half-life. In my experience watching these deals over the last decade — and I have watched a lot of them — my guess is neutrality survives about three to six months, best case. After that, the buyer’s economics tend to take over.
My bet is LiveRamp sticks around as a recognizable brand for a year or two. The “we are still independent” claim probably does not survive 2026.
My read: this deal was shopped, and most holdcos still got caught flat-footed
My read on a deal this size is that it almost certainly got shopped first. There is no version of a $2.2B all-cash transaction where I would expect every major holding company NOT to get a call before the announcement. If that read is right, the fact that the deal landed at Publicis tells you Omnicom-IPG, WPP, Dentsu, and Havas most likely passed — which would mean each of those companies has had a year or so to think about being a customer of a competitor that did buy.
A year is a long time to think about strategy. In this industry, a year is also nowhere near long enough to actually act on it. My guess is most of the holdcos and large independents now facing the “do we keep flowing first-party data through competitor-owned infrastructure?” question are 18 months away from an answer that involves anything other than waiting and seeing.
The brands they serve will not wait 18 months.
Infrastructure has been collapsing for years. LiveRamp just accelerated it.
Here is the broader motion the IMP thesis from Aperiam Ventures was already pointing at, and that the LiveRamp deal just supercharges.
For the last several years, brands have been quietly walking away from the assumption that they need to route everything through neutral third-party infrastructure. They onboard directly to The Trade Desk. They onboard directly to DSPs and SSPs that will integrate first-party data. They build their measurement workflows in Snowflake and clean rooms like InfoSum. They own their identity graph instead of renting it.
This was always going to happen. Brand ownership of infrastructure is the natural endpoint of every data and identity argument over the last ten years. The Publicis/LiveRamp deal does not start this motion; it accelerates it by removing the most popular safety blanket from the table.
The problem — and this is where I come back to my opening line — is that this motion is a massive technology leap for everyone below the Fortune 100. The top 100 brands in the world can hire the engineering teams to onboard directly, build clean room workflows, and stitch together their own measurement. The next 2,000 brands cannot. Neither can the agencies that serve them. Neither can the publishers and SSPs trying to differentiate on curation and partner data.
That is exactly the population LiveRamp built itself to serve. And it is exactly the population LiveRamp, in its new form, will be least incentivized to keep serving on neutral terms.
The infrastructure play that LiveRamp is leaving behind
This is what Agnitio AOS was built for. Today’s announcement does not change our roadmap; it just makes the urgency obvious.
Agnitio is an operating system for media and advertising. It is opinionated about one thing: removing the coordination tax that defines how this industry actually works day to day. It is intentionally not opinionated about which identity, clean room, activation, or measurement vendor you choose to run beneath it.
Gilbert, our orchestrator, plans the work. The Hive — a roster of specialist agents for audience, taxonomy, planning, curation, measurement, privacy, reporting, and the rest of media operations — executes. Customers Agnite a workflow by describing what they want and letting the system take it from there. LLM-agnostic by design. Infrastructure-partner-agnostic by necessity. Independent of any holding company.
What that means in practice for the post-LiveRamp world:
For data owners sitting inside LiveRamp’s data marketplace today, you should not have to choose between a competitor-owned distribution layer and rebuilding your sales motion from scratch. We give you an enrichment and activation surface where buyers describe the audience they need and the system selects the best data sources to fulfill it — your data included, on your terms.
For the small and midsize companies who currently need a separate contracting process with LiveRamp just to run an enrichment job, you do not have to keep doing that. Build the enrichment workflow inside AOS with whichever data partners you choose. We are not asking you to switch identity providers; we are asking you to stop renting the operating layer above them.
For holding companies and large independents that have to reopen the “is our first-party data flowing through competitor infrastructure?” question on every renewal, the answer is not “find another LiveRamp.” There is not another LiveRamp coming. The answer is an operating layer above whatever rails you pick — and the only operating layer that can credibly claim independence is one that is not owned by any holding company.
Category ownership, said out loud
Aperiam Ventures gave this emerging category a name in their Q2 thesis: Integrated Media Platforms. I think it is the right name and the right framing for the destination this industry is racing toward. I also think the operating layer that delivers the IMP pattern across the full stack — buy side, sell side, data layer — is a different and more durable position than any single buying console.
That operating layer is the one we have been building.
So I am going to claim it.
Agnitio is the infrastructure play that LiveRamp is leaving behind. We are the independent operating layer for the IMP era. We are LLM-agnostic, infrastructure-partner-agnostic, and unaffiliated with any holding company by design. We are in production today with data platforms, agencies, publishers, and brands who are not waiting 18 months for the rest of the industry to figure out what just happened.
If you are reading this on a difficult morning, we should talk this week.
Eric Shaffer is CEO and Co-Founder of Agnitio, and a two-time founder with successful exits. He was previously Co-Founder and CEO of 180byTwo, a B2B data intelligence company that was acquired, and later served as Chief Product & Innovation Officer at Anteriad. Earlier in his career, he led measurement solutions for LiveRamp’s platform partners and built an analytics practice at a major agency. He is also a Co-Founder of 4-Eyes.ai (AI-powered audience solutions) and a Board member at Delivr.ai, 4-Eyes.ai, and IPLytics. Member of IAB Tech Lab.
Agnitio AOS is the AI-native operating system for media and advertising — orchestrating a Hive of specialist agents across data, planning, activation, and measurement. Learn more at agnitio.ai or request a demo at agnitio.ai/demo.
