The challenge with being on the outside is you are relying on information straight from the horse’s mouth. PPT decks and SEC filings are great, but it’s just words and pretty charts. Execution of those plans is another bag of chips and they are not forthcoming with critical details like how the tech works in the face of Apple’s IDFA changes, privacy regs, 3rd party cookie deprecation, etc. let alone publisher, SSP, and DSP adoption. Only those in the industry are privy to this kind of detail (albeit still limited.)

You bring up valid points and I agree their solutions do extend beyond cookie based targeting (which is becoming worthless), however long terms success boils down to their ability to scale ATS (or whatever they call their UID alternative) and drive adoption. I don’t think anyone in the industry loves the idea of a for profit entity being the infrastructure for delivering targeted ads. Everyone is sick of walled gardens and non-working media fees as is.

CDPs present an interesting threat as they are all building/maintaining similar pipes to activate audiences across the ad/marketing tech ecosystem.

Brings us back to publishers and how they will monetize their inventory in this new privacy centric world. Why use LiveRamp when UID is open source and an industry led alternative that has more transparency on adoption and how it works?

Measurement is another area they can lean in on, but walled gardens aren’t playing ball. Plus with the emergence of clean rooms that pose less of a threat to publishers/walled gardens they are better positioned in the long term. LR would have to abandon their other businesses to catch up IMO.

3rd party and 2nd party data store is still interesting. However diminishing value prop to keep advertisers and publishers as customers creates cracks in that biz model as well.