With the acquisition of LiveRamp for $2.2 billion, Publicis Groupe is continuing its strategy around data, digital identity and infrastructure capable of powering the future artificial intelligence systems of large companies.
The French group, the world’s number 2 in advertising, is no longer only seeking to strengthen its media or advertising capabilities, but is gradually seeking to build a data infrastructure usable by AI agents capable of operating on a company scale.
The press release published by Publicis also marks a clear break in the vocabulary used by the sector. The group no longer speaks only of advertising targeting or marketing personalization, but of “data co-creation”, “agentic transformation” and “AI agents”. “With LiveRamp, Publicis will become a leader in data co-creation, an important skill in the era of artificial intelligence and a major lever for the agentic transformation of businesses. »
Little known to the general public, LiveRamp nevertheless occupies a central place in the data field. The company provides the technical layers that enable brands, retailers, media platforms and technology partners to connect, reconcile and leverage their data in secure environments. Publicis describes it as “a global data collaboration platform” capable of “unifying, managing and activating their data across the digital ecosystem”.
LiveRamp claims more than 25,000 connected publishers and more than 500 technology partners across 14 markets. Its role is to transform “fragmented and disconnected data into a unified and actionable data asset”.
This positioning is part of a profound transformation of the advertising market that has been underway for more than a decade. The digital advertising economy has long been built around third-party cookies and the closed infrastructures of large American platforms, mainly Google, Meta Platforms and Amazon. These players concentrated user data, targeting capabilities, measurement tools and distribution environments.
But this balance is gradually weakening. The tightening of regulations on personal data, the planned disappearance of third-party cookies and the increasing fragmentation of digital identifiers are calling into question the historical mechanisms of digital advertising.
Faced with this recomposition, large companies are seeking to regain control of their own data and rebuild infrastructures capable of connecting, measuring and activating their audiences without depending exclusively on dominant platforms.
It is precisely on this strategic layer that LiveRamp has built its position. The company traces its origins to Acxiom, a company founded in 1969 and long considered one of the leading marketing data brokers in the world. In 2014, Acxiom purchased LiveRamp for $310 million to accelerate its transition to digital data infrastructures. A few years later, the balance of power symbolically reversed and Acxiom finally abandoned its own name to become LiveRamp.
This evolution alone sums up the shift in value in the advertising industry. Raw data no longer constitutes the main asset, and the value now lies in the ability to connect several sets of data, to circulate them between partners and to make them usable in environments compliant with new regulatory constraints.
The recently announced partnership between Uber Technologies and LiveRamp at the end of December 2025 perfectly illustrates this evolution.
Through a platform called “Uber Intelligence”, Uber will allow advertisers to connect their own customer data with signals from Uber uses: travel, mobility, catering or travel habits. The whole thing is based on LiveRamp’s “clean room” technologies, which allow several companies to exploit common data without directly exposing users’ personal or sensitive data.
A hotel chain could thus identify places frequented by certain traveler profiles in order to design partnerships or targeted loyalty programs. But the objective goes far beyond marketing analysis. Uber also wants to allow brands to directly activate these audiences in its advertising environment.
LiveRamp is no longer just used to connect CRM databases to media platforms, but becomes an infrastructure for circulating, reconciling and exploiting signals intended to feed automated systems.
LiveRamp’s role in data infrastructures is not limited to American platforms. In Europe too, several large groups have used its technologies to accelerate their digital transformation. This is particularly the case of Carrefour, which launched its “Carrefour Links” retail media platform in 2021 in order to better exploit its customer data and strengthen its advertising capabilities compared to Amazon.
At the time, the French distributor already relied on Google, Criteo and LiveRamp to build its data infrastructures and targeting tools. The project was then based on the use of the group’s first-party data from 80 million customers around the world, including 50 million loyalty card holders. Carrefour explained that it had created a “data lake” concentrating the data from 6 billion transactions in order to power its new marketing tools.
With LiveRamp, Carrefour had notably developed “Xperiences”, a solution intended to enable marketing teams to build “extremely qualified audiences”.
Thus, it is well before the current explosion of AI agents that LiveRamp already occupies a strategic position in the transformation of large groups towards models based on proprietary data, retail media and post-cookie targeting infrastructures.
It is precisely this technological layer that Publicis is now seeking to integrate on a larger scale into its own model. The concept of “data co-creation” constitutes the heart of this strategy. Publicis explains that it is about allowing several companies to connect their data in secure environments in order to produce new assets that can be exploited by artificial intelligence systems.
For its part, the group describes several use cases: wealth management agents in banks, optimization of the customer journey in retail or even therapeutic orchestration systems in the pharmaceutical industry.
Publicis is gradually seeking to build an infrastructure capable of powering AI agents operating at the scale of large companies. This acquisition is a continuation of the acquisition of Epsilon Data Management in 2019. Arthur Sadoun himself establishes this link: “ After the acquisition of Epsilon in 2019, in the name of large-scale personalization and to allow our customers to regain control of their data in the face of walled gardens by switching from cookies to identity, we are today approaching the next step. »
“ By building the future of data co-creation, we give our customers the means to generate new, exclusive and proprietary data, to build the smartest and most differentiated AI agents on the best LLMs. »
The competitive context also sheds light on this operation; since the merger between Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, the American group has claimed the position of world number one in the sector thanks to the combined size of its revenues.
Publicis, however, is seeking to shift the competitive playing field, where Omnicom is highlighting consolidation synergies, cost reductions and a massive $5 billion share buyback program, Publicis is seeking to expand its addressable market by building data, identity and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
This strategic divergence is significant, on the one hand, Omnicom is consolidating a traditional advertising market under pressure, on the other, Publicis is trying to position itself on the technological layers likely to become critical in the AI agent economy.
The French group is thus seeking less to compete with historic advertising holding companies than with the infrastructures controlled by American technology giants. Publicis considers this acquisition as a direct growth accelerator. The group raises its 2027 and 2028 objectives to “+7% to +8% for net income and +8% to +10% for current EPS”, and also confirms its 2026 forecasts with organic growth of between 4% and 5%, an improvement in the operating margin and free cash flow expected around 2.1 billion euros.
The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
