Publicis closes LiveRamp deal and launches a client-owned growth engine

Publicis Groupe said it closed its acquisition of LiveRamp, completing an AI growth engine it describes as the industry's first, delivered plug-and-play and owned and controlled end-to-end by clients. The announcement was made in Paris on 2 November 2026.

The engine combines LiveRamp's enterprise collaboration platform with Epsilon's identity capabilities, letting clients enrich their first-party data directly through RampID and Epsilon Identity, add thousands of attributes and make billions of prospects addressable. That data can then be activated across LiveRamp's ecosystem of 25,000 publishers and 500 technology and data partners, as well as retail networks, walled gardens, LLM integrations and Publicis's own media network.

The group says client data stays in client environments, client AI intellectual property remains theirs and there is no platform lock-in. It sits alongside Publicis Sapient, the Marcel agentic activation layer and the group's creative, media, influencer and commerce capabilities.

Arthur Sadoun, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, said clients are trapped between two bad options: surrendering their data to walled gardens for scale, or building custom pipes with an army of consultants. He said the new engine combines plug-and-play simplicity with full ownership and control, while Scott Howe, CEO of LiveRamp, said joining Publicis gives clients a foundation to scale agentic marketing with complete data ownership.

What do these terms mean?

RampID: An audience identifier from LiveRamp that links client data across channels without relying on cookies.

Clean rooms: Secure environments where companies analyse shared data without moving raw data to another party.

Agentic marketing: The use of AI agents to carry out marketing tasks such as audience targeting, ad buying and measuring results.