If You Don't Own Your Identity Infrastructure, You Don't Own Your Business

If You Don't Own Your Identity Infrastructure, You Don't Own Your Business

On May 17, 2026, Publicis Groupe announced it would acquire LiveRamp for $2.2 billion. The deal closed in weeks. And with it, the concept of "neutral identity infrastructure" effectively ended.

This matters to you whether or not you work with Publicis. LiveRamp's RampID is the identity language that connects brands, publishers, retail media networks, and ad tech platforms. More than 25,000 publisher domains use it. According to LiveRamp, more than 500 technology and data partners are built on it. WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu, Havas — agencies that compete directly with Publicis — count it as critical infrastructure.

That shared infrastructure now belongs to one of the teams it was supposed to referee.

"What nobody fully anticipated," a major retailer told The Current, "was that the post-cookie world would also be the post-neutral-infrastructure world. LiveRamp was the last big piece of shared infrastructure that didn't belong to someone with a dog in the fight. Now it does."

We agree. And it's why we're sharing an evaluation template designed to help any brand, retailer, or media company assess their options for reducing risk in identity infrastructure.

Scroll down for the link.

The Identity Trap You Didn't Know You Were In

Most brands didn't choose their identity infrastructure the way they chose their CRM or their media agency. It happened gradually. A vendor became the standard. Campaigns got built on it. Data got resolved through it. Audiences got onboarded into it. And then, one day, you realized you couldn't easily leave.

That's not a bug in how these vendors operate. It's the model. The identity graphs you access belong to them. The resolved links, the match history, the audiences you've built — often, the moment you stop paying, you lose continuity. You're licensing access to a version of your own customers, not building something you own.

The Publicis acquisition doesn't create that dynamic. It just makes it visible. Your identity data — the first-party signals your customers gave you — is now flowing through infrastructure owned by a company that may be pitching against your agency of record. As Mathieu Roche, CEO of ID5, put it: "Brands working with other agencies will be fiercely protective of their greatest asset: their data. They are unlikely to be comfortable with Publicis having proximity to it."

Owning Identity Is Owning Your Business

If your ability to reach, recognize, and personalize for your own customers depends on infrastructure you don't own, you don't fully control your business. Identity infrastructure determines how your first-party data connects to media, how audiences get built, how match rates perform, and what you can do with data from retail partners and clean room collaborators. All of it runs through a handful of vendors.

When one of those vendors changes ownership, pricing, or access terms — or simply starts favoring its parent company's clients — you feel it in match rates, in CPMs, in campaign performance. The Publicis-LiveRamp deal is the clearest example yet of why that dependency is a strategic risk, not just an operational one.

The companies that weather these shifts best own their own identity graph. Not renting access to someone else's. Not licensing a spine that can be repriced or reprioritized. Their own graph, in their own environment, with their own logic — portable, durable, and compounding over time instead of resetting every contract cycle.

Inside the RFI: What It Covers, and Why

This RFI is a 19-section evaluation template for any brand, retailer, or media company that wants to assess their identity infrastructure options. We could have kept it proprietary. We didn't, because the problem of vendor concentration in identity is industry-wide — and the industry moves faster when more companies are asking the right questions.

We believe Narrative wins when evaluated rigorously. We also believe a healthier ecosystem, where brands genuinely own their identity infrastructure, is better for everyone. Both things can be true.

The RFI covers identity resolution, addressability, data onboarding, clean rooms, marketplace, ownership, architecture, integrations, contract and exit terms, and commercial model. Identity and Ownership are weighted highest — deliberately. Contract and exit terms are weighted more heavily than most templates you'll find, because that's where concentration risk is either locked in or avoided.

How to Run This Process

Start with an honest audit before you talk to any vendor. Map every place your identity infrastructure touches your business — where first-party data gets resolved, which partners depend on shared identity, what your current contract says about portability when you leave. Most companies find more exposure than they expected.

Send the RFI to three to five vendors in parallel, not sequentially. Sequential evaluations let vendors learn from each other's pitches. Give them four weeks and score responses against the same rubric. Weight the exit terms heavily — every vendor sounds great on day one, and Section 17 (Contract & Exit) is where you'll see who's actually committed to a clean handoff.

Run a proof of concept before you commit. No evaluation replaces a live test. The gap between what vendors claim and what they deliver shows up fast in a real audience activation or clean room collaboration.

The Moment Is Now

The Publicis acquisition of LiveRamp won't be the last consolidation in identity infrastructure. The pattern — data is the new moat, whoever controls the pipe controls the outcome — will keep playing out. The question for brand marketers isn't whether consolidation happens. It's whether your business is positioned to absorb it.

You don't have to wait for your contract renewal to start thinking about this. The RFI is free, vendor-agnostic in its framing, and designed to give you the questions — and the framework — to run a credible evaluation on your own timeline.

Download it. Run it internally first. Use it to audit your current vendor against the same criteria you'd apply to alternatives. See where you stand.

Owning your identity infrastructure is owning a piece of your business that compounds over time. The companies that figure this out now will have an advantage that's hard to replicate later.

Download the RFI →