What Happens When Identity Becomes a Feature?

Much of the discussion surrounding Publicis' acquisition of LiveRamp has focused on the obvious assets.

Identity. Data collaboration. Retail media. Audience activation.

All important, and all logical places to start. However, I suspect the more interesting question is whether these assets represent where the future value of LiveRamp actually sits.

For much of the last decade, the industry operated on the assumption that value would accrue to whoever owned identity. Identity enabled audience creation, audience activation, and identity enabled measurement and, more recently, data collaboration. That logic created significant value for businesses such as LiveRamp, Epsilon and others operating within the identity ecosystem.

The assumption underpinning this model was that identity would remain the strategic control point around which platform capabilities are licensed to the brand and, historically, the Chief Marketing Officer. I'm increasingly wondering whether that assumption still holds.

The emergence of Snowflake, Databricks and modern cloud data platforms has fundamentally changed the landscape. Capabilities that were once standalone categories, identity resolution, CDP functionality, audience creation, clean rooms and increasingly AI-driven analytics, are steadily becoming embedded within broader data platforms.

This raises an important question. If identity becomes a feature of the platform rather than the platform itself, where does value move?

My suspicion is that the answer may lie less in identity and more in interoperability.

Historically, LiveRamp's moat has often been described as its identity graph. Increasingly, I think its more valuable asset may be the network that sits around it. The integrations, ecosystem participation, governance frameworks and trust that enable data to move between brands, retailers, publishers, cloud platforms and technology providers.

Identity graphs can be rebuilt.

Trusted networks are significantly harder to replicate.

This is why neutrality matters.

Prior to the acquisition, LiveRamp occupied a unique position within the ecosystem. It could sit between competing participants without being perceived as directly aligned to any one of them. That neutrality helped create trust. Trust encouraged participation. Participation strengthened the network. The network became more valuable as a result.

Viewed through this lens, Publicis' challenge may not simply be how to extract greater value from LiveRamp. It may be how to preserve the characteristics that made the asset valuable in the first place.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the company's recent strategic direction appears to extend well beyond its traditional marketing roots.

Announcements such as Databricks Customer Lake and OpenAI integrations are often discussed as product developments. I think they may be more significant as strategic signals. They point towards a future where LiveRamp sits closer to enterprise data infrastructure than marketing infrastructure.

In that world, the buyer evolves. The conversation moves beyond the CMO and increasingly towards the Chief Data Officer, CIO, CTO and AI leadership. Historically, identity was purchased to improve marketing outcomes. Increasingly, the same capabilities are being evaluated as part of broader enterprise data and AI architectures.

The problem being solved is no longer simply audience activation. It becomes governed access to data, trusted collaboration across organisational boundaries and the ability to operationalise AI against fragmented enterprise data estates.

An agentic future makes this even more relevant. As autonomous systems begin interacting across organisations, enterprises will require infrastructure that supports identity, permissioning, governance, auditability and trust.

The future control point may not be identity itself.

It may be the infrastructure that enables trusted interoperability between ecosystems.

Which leads to the question I find most interesting.

Did Publicis acquire an identity business?

Or did it acquire the foundations of a trust and interoperability layer for enterprise data ecosystems?

If the latter proves true, the most valuable asset Publicis acquired may not be RampID.

It may be the trust required to become the connective tissue between increasingly complex data ecosystems.