Acxiom announced the acquisition of LiveRamp for $310m on 14 May. There is a lot of discussion in the press about whether this is a good thing. Investors don’t think so as Acxiom shares tumbled 21% the day after the announcement. Industry pundits are concerned about LiveRamp’s neutrality and ability to service its existing clients, many of whom are Acxiom competitors like Experian. We’ll leave the debate on the wisdom of the acquisition to the press and the market. In the meantime we thought we’d look at what LiveRamp is and does.

LiveRamp enables clients to make their first party data available to use in 80+ platforms. The data sets it works with cover email and postal addresses which reside in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems such as SalesForce. These addresses likely relate to a businesses’ customers who have bought something online or in a physical store, and potential customers who have made enquiries about a product or service.

The platforms into which LiveRamp onboards this data include

– media buying where the data is used for ad targeting in paid search, paid social and banner/video display

– analytics and attribution where the data is used to relate customer behaviour back to marketing efforts to understand marketing effectiveness

– tag management to ingest user data seamlessly from websites

– data management (such as Acxiom) to clean and suppress records, append additional data, and model out to a wider audience of potential new customers

– site personalisation to put relevant content in front of visitors

– audience extension for publishers who can onboard their print subscribers and sell advertising against them online

How does LiveRamp do it? That’s the 310m dollar question of course. The process involves inputting files of customer records ranging from 10,000 to 500,000,000 plus into LiveRamp via SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) or LiveRamp’s interface. These records are then matched with browsers and devices with Personally Identifiable information stripped out. The browser and device IDs are then made available in the 80+ integrated platforms of the types listed above and are ready for use.

In order to do the matching between data record and browser/device LiveRamp has a large network of web publishers. This publisher network is made up of website operators who collect contact information on their sites– for instance, sites where users need to register in order login or transact. When a user logs into a site on the network, a lookup is done against the match-file. If that user is found within the match file, LiveRamp will set an anonymous cookie that is shared with the various integrated platform, completing the “match”.

LiveRamp has a Saas model with clients paying a yearly subscription related to how many records they have in their database.