Notes

Publicis agreed to buy LiveRamp at a 29.8% premium. It can buy the platform. It can't buy the trust.

Part of what made LiveRamp valuable: no agency group controlled it.

More than 25,000 publisher domains and over 500 technology and data partners connect through it.

LiveRamp owns the technology. It doesn't own the relationships that make the network worth joining.

That is a rake on loan.

Publicis already owns Epsilon and Lotame. Its promise: LiveRamp stays "a neutral, interoperable platform." No customer restricted.

I believe them. It doesn't matter.

A pledge is not an architecture. Whoever owns the platform sets its prices, its roadmap and its priorities.

Every rival already owns its own matcher. Omnicom has Acxiom. Dentsu has Merkury. WPP has InfoSum.
LiveRamp was where they could all meet.

My bet: the pledge is kept, and rivals steer their clients elsewhere anyway. Not because access is denied. Because a competitor now owns the room.

Neutrality is not a feature you can acquire. It's a fact about who owns you.

Infillion is buying Foursquare. The trade press read it as ad-tech consolidation.

I read it differently.

Foursquare spent a decade doing what every sensible data business does. It did the enrichment itself. It sold direct. It kept its share.

It still ended up one link short of the buyer's decision.

This week's newsletter is about that one link: where it sits, who is about to hold it, and the question every data business should ask of its own.

When everyone with a car park has a media network, nobody has one.

McDonald's wants a $1 billion ad business. In August it started piloting ads on the drive-thru order boards of 450 of its company-owned US restaurants.

Simon, America's largest mall operator, launched a media network in late August. Circle K relaunched its own the same month.

Amazon, Walmart and a few others will be fine. My bet for the rest: within 5 years, most will be running on someone else's platform, or gone.

Best Buy has already chosen. From February it will sell ads on its own-brand TVs through Amazon's ad tech, on Amazon's TV software.

Retail media was pitched to boards as a high-margin business of their own. For most, it will be a rake on loan with their logo on it.