M&A
What Publicis buying LiveRamp tells us about agency value
Publicis’ proposed acquisition of LiveRamp is not just another large holding company deal.
It is a useful signal for agency owners.
LiveRamp helps companies connect, manage and use customer data across platforms, publishers, retailers and technology partners. In simple terms, it helps businesses make better use of data without handing sensitive customer information around the market.
That matters because the agency model is changing.
For years, marketing services businesses have been valued on specialist expertise: creative, media, performance, PR, SEO, content, brand, social and digital execution.
Those skills still matter. But they are no longer enough on their own.
The larger groups are moving closer to the parts of the client relationship that sit around data, customer intelligence, measurement and commercial performance.
That is the real message from this deal.
Publicis is not buying LiveRamp because it wants another agency brand. It is buying infrastructure. It wants to be more embedded in how clients understand customers, use data, measure performance and make decisions.
For independent agencies, the lesson is not that everyone needs to build a technology platform. In most cases, that would be the wrong answer.
But agencies do need to be clearer about their value story.
Clients are not short of marketing activity. They are short of clarity.
They want to know which customers matter most, which channels are working, where budget is being wasted, and how marketing activity links to growth.
That means agency owners need to be able to answer some harder questions:
How close are you to the client’s commercial decision-making?
How do you measure performance beyond activity and outputs?
What insight do you create that clients cannot easily get elsewhere?
How embedded are you in their growth agenda?
Can the business scale without simply adding more people?
AI makes this more important, not less. AI is only as useful as the information it can work with. If a client’s data is fragmented or poorly understood, AI will not fix the problem on its own.
The strongest agencies will not be the ones that make the biggest claims about AI. They will be the ones that help clients organise, interpret and act on better information.
That is where value is moving.
For agency founders, the takeaway is simple.
Be clear about where you sit in the client’s growth agenda. Be clear about how your work improves decision-making. Be clear about what insight you create, how that changes outcomes, and why your agency matters beyond delivery.
Good work still matters.
But the most valuable agencies will be the ones that help clients make better commercial decisions.
