Havas Media Group Gets Data From Its LiveRamp Partnership—Without Acquisition Pain

Havas Media Group (HMG) struck a unique data deal that helps it stand out from its competition and sets a new precedent for how agencies and data brokers can work together. “We didn't want to acquire another Merkle, another Epsilon or another CRM agency—we have our own CRM agency. We knew we wanted to partner with companies, but we didn't know how,” said Mike Bregman, chief data officer for Havas Media Group (HMG) in North America. The group tested partnerships with a few other data companies, but chose not to scale them, while building out tech and data capabilities internally, including its mar-tech and data consulting practice. Ultimately HMG decided it wanted a large partner, but it wasn’t going to make an acquisition. “When we looked at our 65-ish clients, we knew that we needed the lowest common denominator, and LiveRamp was that one,” said Bregman. The partnership, in its nascent stages, began in November 2020. Now the group is seeing the collaboration’s results, as clients like Papa John’s leverage LiveRamp data on HMG’s Converged platform. Virginia Passes Data Privacy Law, Reigniting Calls for a Federal Solution The deal with LiveRamp The LiveRamp integration is bespoke to HMG North America and its clients, and enables audience segment creation using first, second and third-party data and can also ingest client data. All of this makes it easier for clients to combine data and use the insights to send a message to the right people. "Converged now allows us to create meaningful consumer experiences in one platform,” said Greg Walsh, CEO of Havas Media Group, North America, in a statement, noting that HMG opted for a strategy it calls a "partner and build" approach, and that the technology is available to clients today. The HMG partnership is the first partnership of this kind with a media agency that LiveRamp has announced. While the data company offers its bespoke solution to HMG clients in North America, the agency retains its data partnerships with different data providers in other markets. This partnership doesn't change that any client or agency can approach LiveRamp to access its data or Safe Haven product. It's the bespoke platform build that makes this truly unique to Havas. Partner and build Each holding company has taken its own approach to hunting down and organizing consumer data. Some, like Publicis, IPG and Dentsu, opted to buy the data through acquiring so-called data brokers Epsilon, Acxiom and Merkle. Others, like Omnicom, lean on partnerships, fashioning their platform as an operating system capable of linking vast datasets from multiple sources together. Havas is doing something entirely different by forging a deep partnership with a single partner and involving that partner in both elements of its platform build as well as its service offering. “We believe that it has to be a model where it's a partner and build mentality. We used to think about this as renting technology. But really we've now pivoted that to partnering with best-in-class partners,” said Bregman. To that end, LiveRamp integrated its data collaboration platform Safe Haven—essentially clean room infrastructure—with HMG's Converged platform. "Safe Haven allows for both agencies and brands to collaborate where they can house their first party data in a secure fashion and not have to have it be visible or permitted to, let's say, the agency," said Alysia Melisaratos, head of solutions engineering at LiveRamp. HMG, for its part, guided the build on Safe Haven's modules, functionality, output, design, measurement environments and dashboards. Cookies and costs At the center of the deal is an ongoing discussion about how to contend with looming third-party cookie deprecation. LiveRamp’s solution to this is what it calls its Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), plus an integration strategy. The company created the RampID, which is a pseudonymized code that represents a real person. The code allows LiveRamp to keep an individual’s personal information anonymous, a common tactic data companies are taking to meet privacy regulations. RampIDs integrate with “over 400 different identifiers"—or personal attributes—according to Diego Panama, chief commercial officer at LiveRamp, making it possible for LiveRamp to establish a deep understanding of an individual. LiveRamp has 45 years’ worth of data across 150 different sources, from census data, surveys, public records and more that it can pull from. “No PII, but we're able to overlay additional information, working with the outside vendors. In the media space, we're able to find these people, we're able to have the right moments, the right messages, and ultimately all of that translates into this great virtuous loop that gets better and better performance in real time,” said Bregman. LiveRamp told Adweek it’s investing about $120 million each year in research and development, with a goal of preparing for third-party cookie deprecation. According to an expert familiar with the matter, Havas and LiveRamp are "co-investing" in their partnership. Havas will pay LiveRamp for its technology, but LiveRamp's significant research and development investments will future-proof Havas' infrastructure. Agency clients can opt in to use Safe Haven and LiveRamp data, creating a mutually beneficial situation in which the partnership yields returns for both parties, as HMG brings more clients into the LiveRamp ecosystem. According to Forrester vp and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, LiveRamp may have “seen the writing on the wall” long ago. The company’s investment in contending with deprecation provides “some kind of infrastructure for digital advertising to work on in the future, especially when cookies go away,” she said. This strategy, said Bregman, helps the agency avoid the massive research and development costs—in LiveRamp’s case, a $120 million yearly expense—that other holding companies who chose to buy data companies must cover. The future, Bregman believes, will feature more bespoke data science models for clients that agencies will need to build in collaboration with ad tech vendors. The partnership with LiveRamp gives Havas a “Rosetta Stone” to navigate the process because it will have been through the process of collaborating with a third-party to co-build a product. How Omnicom’s Data Platform Helps Clorox Clean Up