May 13th-May 19th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. We have a big-time industry deal to tell you about: Ramplicis!
Check out the latest AI Edge Podcast episode with Scott Brinker, AKA “The Godfather of Martech”
We unpack his 2026 State of Martech report, dig into all of his fascinating AI market research and revelations, and even attempt to pronounce the pupal stage of a butterfly. Which is Scott’s metaphor for where we are in our AI transformation journey as an industry.
Top Stories 👁
Publicis acquires LiveRamp in a major shakeup for indie data collaboration
Source: AdExchanger
May 18th, 2026
Summary: Agency holding company Publicis just bought data onboarding, data collaboration, and identity platform LiveRamp for $2.2B. The all-cash deal values LiveRamp at a 29.8% premium. Publicis will add LiveRamp's tech to its existing stack, which includes Epsilon (1st-party data management + deterministic identity + media activation), Lotame (3rd-party data marketplace + probabilistic identity), Publicis Sapient (tech), Marcel (agentic marketing platform), and more. LiveRamp chief executive Scott Howe will stay on as CEO.
LiveRamp was founded in 1969 as Demographics, Inc., a company that produced mailing lists for marketing purposes from phonebooks and payroll processing data. Over time, it morphed into the industry’s leading data platform to help advertisers with “data onboarding," or matching their user data with other user data, and bringing offline data online. Today, LiveRamp also provides a user identity infrastructure that is used by much of the ad tech industry called RampID. RampID is one of the most common user identifiers in programmatic advertising, used for scaling audience targeting and measurement across digital platforms and channels. The company’s valuation hit an all-time high during the pandemic at a valuation of ~$7B. It’s been languishing at a valuation of ~$1B-$2B since then.
LiveRamp bought Habu, a data clean room technology, in 2024 to bolster its privacy-safe data matching capabilities. WPP bought Habu competitor InfoSum last year.
LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe has called the company "Switzerland" for years: a neutral place where multiple parties can match data. Now Publicis buys Switzerland.
Deal Grades:
LiveRamp: B-
Publicis: B+
Opinion: Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis, is no idiot. He knows that Publicis buying LiveRamp will kill any notion that it can be a neutral safe haven for data collaboration and identity, or, Switzerland. He also knows that this will hurt LiveRamp’s core business, as companies outside of the Publicis ecosystem (agencies, publishers, marketers, etc.) pull back their LiveRamp spend and seek alternatives. So what’s the big $2.2B idea, Arthur? We think that Publicis wants to use its data assets, including LiveRamp, to transform itself into a modern, data-driven, media buying business.
Agencies are facing a reckoning:
The walled gardens are coming after the agencies, with agentic data infrastructure, end-to-end buying tools, inventory and data scale, and identity that’s very hard to compete with. Mark Zuckerberg essentially said as much.
AI is forcing marketers to rethink the agency value proposition and the economics of their agency partnerships🔒.
Marketers are increasingly bringing agency work in-house.
The big holdcos have been trying to deal with this reckoning in different ways. Omnicom decided to buy IPG to amass scale. WPP hired former Microsoft exec Cindy Rose to transform the company into a tech platform. Havas and Horizon🔒 want to become an AI operating layer for marketers. What’s Publicis been doing? They bought Epsilon and Lotame. They’ve been winning big accounts on the backs of the Epsilon data + identity story. They pushed hard into principal-based media buying🔒 to grow margin. They publicly railed against The Trade Desk fees🔒. All of these moves point to one thing: Publicis wanting to become a modern, data-driven, media buying business.
It makes sense for Publicis. They are zigging while other agency holdcos are zagging. They’re getting back to the roots of the agency holdco business model from the TV era: buy media in bulk so their clients can get lower rates versus if they were to negotiate with publishers on their own. And somewhere along the way, start taking margin on that media as well. The difference between then and now is that we live in a digital world, and data is what juices up the value of media. Data is Publicis’s media margin opportunity. Enter Epsilon + Lotame + LiveRamp.
Publicis wants to continue to win accounts based on their data story, wrap it all up in a performance-based buying model for marketers, double-dip on agency fees and principal-based media margin, and compete with the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon, while taking down the likes of The Trade Desk. They believe that making margin on as much media as possible is what will help them transform from a traditional agency holdco (that is getting squeezed from all sides) into an industry behemoth. And that data (LiveRamp) is the key to unlocking that transformation into a modern, data-driven, media buying business.
That is a big idea. Bigger than $2.2B, if executed properly. Arthur is no idiot.
A Few More Q1 Earnings
LiveRamp (👍): Revenue was up 9% to $206M, beating estimates. LiveRamp announced it will be acquired by Publicis Groupe for $38.50 per share in cash (a 30% premium), valuing the company at ~$2.2B. Shares surged +26% to bring the value the company near the purchase price.
Dentsu (🤷): Organic growth was 0.8% in Q1. Japan was the bright spot, with organic growth of 4.7%, while the Americas declined 3%, EMEA grew 0.8%, and APAC fell 7.5%. The Japanese agency holding company reiterated its full-year organic growth guidance of 0–1%. Shares rose less than 1%.
Nexxen (🤷): Revenue was up 11% to $86.8M, beating estimates. Programmatic revenue was up 14% to $81.9M, and CTV revenue was up 12% to $29.4M. Nexxen raised its full-year programmatic revenue guidance. Shares closed nearly flat after an intraday dip.
Other Notable Headlines
Amazon quietly slashed affiliate commissions by up to 50%, and publishers are scrambling🔒 - Amazon's Associates program lets content creators, bloggers, publishers, and influencers earn a commission when their content drives a sale on Amazon. The company recently restructured the program without any public announcement, cutting commission rates by as much as half in some categories and eliminating milestone-based bonuses for most publishers. The timing is rough for publishers already dealing with Google AI Overviews eating into their organic search traffic. Many are now rerouting commerce traffic to Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, with one publisher calling the forced pivot "short-term bad, medium-term excellent" because it nudged them to diversify away from Amazon.
One quarter of North American agencies have shifted to fixed-fee pricing🔒 - A new study from Forrester Consulting and Dentsu Creative found that 25% of North American agencies have already shifted exclusively to fixed-fee pricing, with nearly two-thirds reporting satisfaction with the model. Fixed-fee pricing is a model where agencies charge a set price for a defined scope of work, rather than billing based on time spent and headcount. The shift is being driven in part by AI, which is compressing the time it takes to do work and putting pressure on traditional labor-based billing models. Nearly 70% of respondents said the biggest appeal of fixed-fee pricing is improved budgeting and forecasting.
Inside The Trade Desk’s Claude-powered campaign agent🔒- New details are emerging about Koa Agents, the agentic campaign tool The Trade Desk launched in April with Stagwell as its first client. Through an interoperability layer called Open Agentic Kit, the system connects with external AI models including Anthropic's Claude to take a media plan, build out a campaign, flag creative issues, and surface recommendations along with the reasoning behind them. The agent seeks human approval before acting, rather than operating on its own. The product lowers the barrier to running programmatic campaigns, which has historically required specialized agency expertise. We were asked to weigh in:
X is making a major creator push, launching an ad product to connect brands and users - X has unveiled Creator Connect, an AI-powered tool that matches brands with creators on the platform based on campaign goals, audience fit, and trending topics. Rather than defaulting to the biggest accounts, the product is built to help brands find smaller, more specialized creators who have built loyal followings around a particular topic or interest. X has already piloted the product with a handful of advertisers, including pairing a laptop brand with tech creators who follow Formula 1 racing. The launch puts X in more direct competition with TikTok, Meta, Snapchat, and YouTube for a share of creator economy ad spending.
X is trying to get advertisers to come back…
Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓
Google Search as you know it is over - At Google I/O, Google announced a fundamental restructure of how Google Search works, shifting results from ranked website links to interactive, AI-generated experiences, dynamic visuals, and personalized agents that act on your behalf. This is the biggest change to Google Search in its 25-year existence and will have major implications for open web traffic and advertising. Publishers already struggling with declining traffic have even more reason to be concerned.
Amazon bets creator video podcasts can be the next TV network, if it can fix measurement🔒 - Amazon used its recent Upfront to pitch creator-led video podcasts as a legitimate alternative to TV advertising. But Amazon says measurement across platforms it doesn't own remains the biggest obstacle.
Jury tosses Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman - A federal jury ruled that Musk waited too long to sue Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman, and OpenAI for breaching duty of charitable trust to OpenAI and for unlawfully enriching themselves from the organization. Musk says he will appeal, calling the outcome a "calendar technicality."
That’s It For This Week 👋
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