With Publicis now owning LiveRamp, the alternatives are being built piece by piece

Publicis closed its acquisition of LiveRamp on Nov. 2, at an enterprise value of about $2.2 billion. For rival holding companies, part of the infrastructure they use to activate client data now belongs to a direct competitor.

The FTC negotiated neutrality and data protection commitments, backed by independent audits, in a proposed consent order that is still open for public comment. That puts guardrails on the relationship. It doesn't give everyone a reason to stay.

Omnicom said it would speed up its exit and move to Real ID, built by Acxiom. WPP has InfoSum. Havas is staying put. "We're clients of Publicis now," Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré said in July, according to Digiday.

This is mostly a U.S. story. International markets accounted for about 6.1% of LiveRamp's revenue in the fiscal year ended March 2026, according to its annual report. So the search for alternatives starts in the U.S., then moves to Europe.

It comes down to three things.

First, CRM onboarding. Advertisers want to find their customers on ad platforms so they can target them, exclude them or measure what they buy after seeing an ad. That means matching their CRM data to identifiers those platforms recognize, then sending the audiences over.

Second, a shared ID. RampID identifies the same person across sites and platforms. LiveRamp extends that ID to publisher inventory through ATS, its publisher-side product. A matched customer is no use if you can't reach them in a campaign. There's a catch: an ID tied to logins only reaches the users its partners can recognize.

Third, a data clean room, built on Safe Haven and Habu, which LiveRamp acquired. Advertisers, retailers and publishers use it to pool their data, analyze audiences and measure results.

The three aren't separate services. RampID is the identity layer LiveRamp relies on for matching, activation and collaboration between data owners. Rivals can try to replace those services without building their own identifier by plugging into existing ones.

Say a retailer wants to reach occasional shoppers on news sites, then measure their in-store purchases. It may need all three. The hard part is wiring them together and replicating the partner network already connected to LiveRamp.

For shared identity, the options include identity vendor ID5 and The Trade Desk-backed UID2. ID5 provides identity resolution across channels. UID2 uses email addresses and phone numbers to connect advertiser data with audiences on participating publishers.

ID5 also offers onboarding. Advertisers can test what share of their hashed emails turn up in ID5's identity graph, then check where those customers can actually be activated.

Hightouch goes after onboarding more directly with Match Booster. The composable CDP runs on a customer's data warehouse and adds identifiers to its audiences before sending them to ad platforms. The goal is to get more customers recognized for targeting, suppression or measurement. Its graph relies on partner data providers, which the company doesn't name. Hightouch has also announced an integration with Google Cloud BigQuery's clean rooms.

Several clean room vendors can already point to U.S. customers. They don't all do the same job.

Optable combines identity, collaboration and activation. Hearst signed a deal with Optable that lets advertisers match their data against Hearst's in Optable's clean room, for planning, activation and measurement. Digital media company Raptive is also a client; its testimonial highlights identity resolution and addressability. In other words, the Canadian vendor sells more than a standalone analytics tool.

Snowflake has heavyweight customers. Disney built its advertising clean room on Snowflake's technology, and NBCUniversal uses Snowflake for its Audience Insights Hub. Advertisers can match their data against the media companies' to analyze audiences and campaign performance. Snowflake supplies the infrastructure; the media companies build their own collaboration programs on top.

Databricks counts AppsFlyer, Mastercard and Intuit among its Clean Rooms customers. The use cases go beyond advertising: Intuit uses them to match borrowers with lenders, Mastercard for fraud analysis. Those customers show Databricks can get data owners to collaborate, not that it can match LiveRamp's media connections.

AWS Clean Rooms is another option. Fox and Dish Media use it for insights and campaign analysis. DirecTV Advertising has also added it to its collaboration setup, alongside Snowflake and LiveRamp. AWS isn't tied to any holding company, but it is owned by Amazon, which matters to buyers who care who owns their vendors.

So the tools exist, and the biggest U.S. media companies already use them. But using the same technology as a publisher doesn't give you access to its data. The parties still have to agree on what data each side contributes, which analyses are allowed and how results get activated.

EUID, from The Trade Desk, adapts UID2 to European privacy rules. Identity vendor Utiq builds its ID from telecom carrier signals, with user consent. French identity vendor First-id provides a shared ID across the sites that use it. ID5 operates in Europe too. Many of the same vendors show up on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hightouch launched Match Booster in five European countries, including France, on Nov. 3. The company says it uses a European identity graph to enrich audiences in the region. It hasn't named the identity partners behind it.

Clean room vendor Decentriq can supply the clean room and rely on third-party IDs for matching. A test by French publisher Hachette Livre with First-id shows how. Hachette used IDs collected on the Hachette and Larousse websites to match their visitors with audiences from French media groups Reworld Media, Prisma Media and RMC BFM Ads in Decentriq's clean rooms. The partners then activated lookalike audiences. The ID handles the matching, the clean room the analysis, the media partners the activation. The setup only works if all three pieces are in place.

French data platform mediarithmics is trying to bring more of these functions together. It has a CDP, a clean room and, since April 2026, ConnectID, which matches advertisers' CRM data with identifiers available through its partners.

"Our goal is to partner with all of these identifiers," said Gilles Chételat, CEO of mediarithmics. He noted that the service works today with legacy identifiers such as mobile IDs, and increasingly with publisher IDs, and named ID5, Utiq and First-id among its partners. ConnectID works with existing identifiers rather than creating a RampID equivalent. Despite the name, it's a matching service that connects CRM data to existing identifiers.

Demand is strongest among grocery retailers, Chételat said. They have large loyalty databases, still make the vast majority of their sales in stores and need to find their customers on the open web. The company also wants to sign up energy and travel advertisers. Reworld Media joined ConnectID in June as a contributing partner, after rolling out mediarithmics' CDP and clean room.

The company also wants to make sales measurement simpler. A brand sold through several retailers ends up juggling different clean rooms, methodologies and in-house expertise just to read the results. mediarithmics will either provide its platform or run the measurement itself. It aims to offer a single view of campaigns' sales impact across retailers in 2027, Chételat said.

That moves the problem rather than solving it. Putting results in one tool won't make them comparable. Providers will need to spell out their methodologies, which sales each partner can see and whether a result simply ties exposure to purchases or measures true incrementality.

Chételat said Publicis's purchase of LiveRamp "validates the value of data collaboration." In the U.S., he sees LiveRamp as "market infrastructure." In Europe, where LiveRamp has a smaller footprint, the deal mainly pushes advertisers, retailers and agencies to take a closer look at who controls their collaboration partners.

It's also a convenient argument for mediarithmics. To make its case for neutrality, Chételat points to the company's model: no proprietary ID, no audience sales and no ties to a holding company or a media company. The company wants to supply the technology that connects partners, while leaving room for third-party identifiers.

"Our advice to any advertiser: test your matching vendor with your own data to see what it really delivers," Chételat said. The test has to run end to end. What share of customers gets matched? On which inventory can they be reached? Which sales can then be measured? Alternatives to LiveRamp will have to prove themselves at every step of that chain.