The Ally – A content series showcasing thought leaders who are moving the audience and advertising industry forward.
Hear from the industry’s top movers and shakers as they share their unique perspectives on audience data, the advertising landscape, and their personal approach to navigating an evolving industry. Alliant values our many tenured partnerships and is always learning from ally brands that share a passion for innovative data solutions.
In this Q&A edition of The Ally, Sam Rahe, Managing Director, Data Marketplace at LiveRamp, shares his stance on trusted partners, maximizing data collaboration, and a look ahead to RampUp 2025.
Alliant is a premier data provider trusted by thousands of brands and agencies, so it made perfect sense to integrate their transactional-based data into LiveRamp’s Data Marketplace. This partnership unlocks a trusted third-party data source for advertisers to leverage for omnichannel and especially TV campaigns. More specifically, LiveRamp’s Data Marketplace provides the infrastructure for the seamless activation of Alliant data to approximately 150 downstream marketplace buyers including brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms with a focus on TV advertising.
Alliant brings established audiences in key B2C verticals across retail, auto, travel, financial services, political, and more, and is consistently bringing forward new audience innovation, like their recent CPG category launch. It’s clear that through this evolving relationship, both partners are building stronger relationships with advertisers, marketers, and tech platforms alike. We are excited to drive continued revenue growth together as we head into 2025.
As a Managing Director on LiveRamp’s Data Marketplace team, I oversee Audience Solutions, a specialized group of data consultants within LiveRamp that focuses on connecting data buyers with data sellers. Whether it’s audience targeting recommendations, custom segments, or understanding data collection methodologies, our team can seamlessly be integrated at any stage of the partnership. Working with clients of all sizes, we ensure audiences that fit buyers' needs are readily accessible through LiveRamp’s Data Collaboration platform, enabling data buyers to achieve their data-driven marketing objectives efficiently.
Every year, buyers consistently ask for more transparency into the data/audiences they are purchasing. So far, 2025 is no exception.
LiveRamp’s Data Marketplace, as well as the Audience Solutions team, prides itself on making sure our customers get exactly what they are looking for, understand where it is coming from, and how it was sourced / collected. For any data sellers reading this, if you didn’t already know, gone are the days of complex segment definitions and highly technical collection methods. Buyers don’t care how advanced your algorithm is, the inner workings of your modeling scoring system, or how many MRC accreditations you have. Buyers want to easily understand your data so they can succinctly articulate the “Who”, “What”, “How”, “When” and “Where” to their client or executive. Real-world examples work best – you should be able to put the end buyer in the shoes of the segment.
With data privacy policies and regulations on the rise, it’s worth mentioning how custom audiences will become more and more common in 2025, especially in the health category. We’re seeing advertisers coming to LiveRamp with specific audience qualifiers that require bespoke segments – built to spec – in order to achieve their objectives.
And I’d be remiss not to mention that 2025 will be the year of CTV (again)! As investment in CTV continues to increase, connecting the linear and digital worlds is an ongoing theme that my team and I find ourselves at the crossroads of. Buyers want to leverage signals related to TV viewership for targeting online – as well as the reverse, leveraging online behavioral signals / sources for addressable TV.
The so-called “cookie-pocalypse” – or lack thereof – highlighted the growing need for alternative identifiers marketers can use to track, target, and measure consumer behavior online. By the time Google decided to keep the third-party cookie, half of the web was already cookieless across browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. Activating on inherently cookieless channels like CTV and mobile in-app, marketers embracing omnichannel experiences are already utilizing cookieless solutions for enhanced connectivity and more robust results.
This shift towards cookieless has made an identifier like RampID even more crucial for effective advertising through robust linkages of data points such as name, address, and other signals. This improves match rates, conversion rates, and privacy and security, while more accurate targeting helps reduce waste. Cookieless solutions provide connectivity across all channels, as well as the opportunity to leverage second- and third-party data via data collaboration.
Advertisers have been leveraging RampID to drive effective and measurable results since its inception in 2019. Alliant was one of our first partners to map to RampID and they have seen the adoption of their audiences tied to RampID really scale. RampID continues to evolve, leveraging authenticated identity, that is cross-channel and connected to anywhere marketers’ audiences may be spending their time, all while continuing to leverage third-party cookies where they exist and are opted into. RampID offers a sustainable pillar for advertising strategies and provides a reliable strategy for real-world business outcomes at scale.
RampUp has reached the point where those in our ecosystem know what to expect – in the best way possible. For anyone not familiar with RampUp, it’s February 26-27, 2025, in San Francisco, where attendees will hear how some of the most innovative companies are using data collaboration to accelerate their businesses.
This year we are especially excited to be focused around three key themes: Build, Create, and Imagine. Each area will showcase how to capitalize on data collaboration at every stage of maturity – from how to set up a durable technical foundation to exploring how next-gen technology, like AI, can be advanced through data collaboration. The LiveRamp Audience Solutions and Alliant teams will be there ready to build, create and imagine with you.
Interested in learning more about how to partner with Sam and the Audience Solutions team, reach out to datamarketplace@liveramp.com. If you would like to connect with Alliant and discuss audience data and advertising possibilities, please reach out. We would love to hear from you!