There was a time, not so long ago, when Switzerland made sense as a business model.

LiveRamp occupied that position in the digital advertising ecosystem — the neutral data infrastructure that sat politely between brands, publishers, retailers, and the various technology platforms that connect them all. Its identity graph, known as RampID, and its Authenticated Traffic Solution, which appears on roughly 80 percent of the top comScore publishers, made it the shared language through which logged-in audiences became addressable inventory. Its Safe Haven clean room technology powered data collaborations for Target's Roundel, Albertsons Media Collective, Walgreens Advertising Group, and dozens of other commerce media networks.

The operative word in all of those descriptions is "was."

Publicis Groupe's $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, announced last month, represents the final piece in an architecture that Arthur Sadoun, the chief executive of Publicis, has been assembling with evident deliberation since 2019. That year brought Epsilon for $4.4 billion and its 2.3 billion consumer profiles. CitrusAd followed in 2021, Profitero in 2022, and Lotame earlier this year. Combined with its Sapient engineering division and various artificial intelligence initiatives, Publicis now claims approximately four billion consumer profiles covering what it says is 91 percent of adult internet users globally.

That is no longer an advertising company. That is a data and technology company that also, as it happens, manages advertising.

(The filing cabinet in the memory suggests that previous assurances about maintaining neutrality after acquisition have aged with varying degrees of grace.)

The implications are concrete. Premium streaming publishers like NBCUniversal, Disney, Paramount, and Netflix have embedded LiveRamp's technology into their cookieless monetization infrastructure. Those same publishers negotiate annual deals with Publicis's buying agencies. They now share their most valuable asset — logged-in subscriber identity — through infrastructure owned by their negotiating counterpart.

Mr. Sadoun has pledged that LiveRamp will remain neutral and interoperable, and that pledge deserves acknowledgment. But brands and chief marketing officers would be wise to audit their data collaboration arrangements with some care. When your agency owns the measurement infrastructure, the phrase "independent verification" acquires an asterisk.

The door this opens, of course, is precisely the one the major holding companies are walking away from: the position of trusted neutral advisor. There will be clients who find that vacancy worth filling.

Original story published in MediaPost: "Publics-LiveRamp: The End Of The Neutral Middle"