The dinner at Il Teatro in Cannes was the kind of conversation the industry needed to have. Senior ad execs, agencies, and brands gathered to ask a genuinely important question: what does the data and identity landscape look like now that Publicis is acquiring LiveRamp? Who fills that role? What does the stack look like from here?
Good questions, all of them. And worth adding one more to the mix.
Because underneath the "who's next" discussion is a more interesting one: what do CMOs actually need from their data infrastructure, and is a direct replacement even the right model? When you pull on that thread, the conversation shifts. It's less about finding the next neutral hub and more about what it would look like to build something better, data that stays under your control, stays connected to every platform you need, and stays useful in real time, regardless of how the vendor landscape evolves around it.
That's a more optimistic frame. And right now, there's an opportunity to get it right.
What LiveRamp actually did well (and why it matters)
The Digiday piece quoted Ciarán O'Kane making a sharp observation: "LiveRamp has a graph, and an onboarding piece. There's not that many companies out there doing that." He's right. But the broader point in the article is more interesting: LiveRamp's real moat wasn't the identity graph itself. It was everything wired to it: the marketplace, the reach, years of match-rate work nobody sees.
That's context plus activation, not just identity.
Most of the vendors now raising their hands as successors are pitching one piece of that stack. A clean room. An identity graph. A cloud-native activation layer. Each of these is useful. None of them is the full answer on its own. Storage is not a solution. An identity graph without distribution reach isn't a replacement for anything. And activation without governed, consented, real-time context is just moving data faster without knowing whether it means anything.
What the Cannes conversation is circling, even if it hasn't landed on the phrasing yet, is this: the next infrastructure model can't just replicate what LiveRamp did. It has to do more.
Start with what CMOs are actually trying to accomplish, and the path forward gets clearer. Most are solving three things simultaneously, and the best infrastructure decisions address all three.
Data sovereignty. They want their first-party data to stay theirs, operationally and strategically, regardless of who builds a partnership with whom. This isn't about distrust of any particular vendor. It's about architecture. Data that lives inside your own cloud environment, activated without replication into a third-party system, doesn't travel when a deal closes. The brand still has it. The brand still controls it.
Real-time context. The Cannes conversation is heavy on identity and governance but light on context. A customer's consent status and cross-device identity are necessary but not sufficient. What makes that profile useful is knowing what that customer is doing right now. What they searched for this morning. What they browsed on mobile before walking into a store. What product category they've been revisiting for three weeks. Real-time behavioral signals, unified with identity and delivered to activation systems in the moment, are what turn a governed data asset into a competitive one.
Reliable activation reach. This is what Bob Walczak from MadConnect captured well in Digiday: he expects the post-LiveRamp industry to end up as multiple interoperating players that sit close to media with direct connections. The breadth of connections LiveRamp built isn't easily replicated by a single challenger. But brands that have built a governed, real-time data layer that connects to the platforms they actually use, across paid media, CRM, personalization, AI, and analytics, are less dependent on any single connectivity provider to deliver that reach.
Governance is the foundation. Context and activation are the return.
There's a version of this moment where companies focus on data sovereignty and compliance infrastructure, check those boxes, and move on. That makes sense as a first step. But the bigger opportunity is what comes after.
Governance alone does not make data useful.
Consent management matters enormously. Data residency matters. Audit trails and access controls matter. But a brand that has perfectly governed data with no way to enrich it with real-time behavioral context, and no reliable activation path to the platforms and media environments where customers actually are, has built a very compliant vault. Not a data strategy.
The question worth asking isn't just "is our data protected?" It's "can we use it to know our customers better and reach them faster than we could yesterday?"
That's where governance and activation meet. A customer's consent status, their live behavioral signals, their predictive attributes, their identity across devices and channels, unified and delivered in real time to whatever system needs to act on it. That's what drives personalization that converts. AI models that produce outputs worth trusting. Media spend that doesn't evaporate on signal loss.
The brands that come out of this moment with a real advantage won't be the ones who found the most neutral vendor. They'll be the ones who use the disruption to rebuild their data infrastructure on a model that gives them sovereignty, context, and activation at once, rather than trading one against another.
As Walczak put it in Cannes, the more progressive companies aren't just looking for a like-for-like replacement. They're using this as an opportunity to rebuild the right way. "This is what will give businesses an edge."
He's right. The brands that treat this as a vendor swap will end up back in the same conversation in three years when the next acquisition closes. The ones that treat it as an architectural reset, and ask what data infrastructure should actually look like when it's built to last, have a window right now that won't stay open forever.
The real successor to LiveRamp isn't a company. It's a set of principles about where data lives, how it stays current, how governance and activation coexist, and what it means to truly own your customer relationships in an era where those relationships are increasingly mediated by AI.
That's the conversation worth having. What do you think?
