Everybody's looking for the exit. Since Publicis announced its $2.2 billion deal for LiveRamp in May, the calculus changed for a lot of folks on the buy side like DSPs and agencies. Many ad tech vendors and data partners have also been looking to deconcentrate reliance on RAMP's pipes.
The instinct is to find a drop-in replacement. One graph, one ID, one vendor to swap for the last one. That instinct is a trap.
You don't need to replace LiveRamp with another LiveRamp. You need to replace three functions. Do that on infrastructure you control, and you’ve escaped any closed system built to extract value from your first-party data. And you're impervious to further machinations of the industry.
Start by separating the ID from the functionality
RampID earns its fee doing three things: onboarding data so it's usable, targeting audiences across the open web, and measuring what happened. That's the whole franchise. Onboarding, targeting, measurement.
None of the three should require a proprietary ID sitting in the middle, charging fees every time it's activated. What’s needed is infrastructure — the pipes to capture a signal, resolve it, and move it. That doesn't make this a weekend migration — you're still re-mapping IDs and re-testing bid logic, and existing contract terms will dictate timing. But once you see the functions as separable from the ID, the work is finite and targeted, not a full graph rebuild.
Here's what that looks like on infrastructure you own
Everything below is what GrowthCode runs for you. If you’re a publisher, you’re building a graph from your first-party data. If you’re a buyer, you’re building a graph from your CRM and deterministic data. Same GrowthCode infrastructure underneath to run the pipes and plumbing.
The point of owning the infrastructure is that the value stays with you.
This is where the model separates from the alternatives. Your data being stored in someone else's proprietary graph is a cost that never stops — you pay to onboard, you pay to activate, you pay to enrich, and the intelligence about your own campaigns accrues to the company that owns the graph.
GrowthCode takes no position in the media. No proprietary ID to adopt, no DSP competing for the same spend, no holding company on the other side of the table. The infrastructure is built to connect to what you already run rather than replace it, which is what keeps the lift low and the cost predictable — you pay for the compute and volume to orchestrate your own data, not for access to it. Customers own their identity logic and their activation strategy; GrowthCode runs the dispassionate pipes underneath.
For instance, Publishers we work with have seen 12–25% revenue uplift in early deployments using our infrastructure to leverage that signal in bid enrichment. The value stays with the party that generated the signal.
For buyers the benefit is the mirror image: a private graph you own, direct matching to publisher signal with no toll each time an audience is activated or enriched, and a measurement loop that stays out of a competitor's platform. Less intermediaries and tolls mean more opportunities, more dollars to working media and higher ROAS.
Know which way the market is actually moving.
Watch the acquisitions, not the pitch decks. Everyone is building their own currency — buyers and vendors are standing up owned identity, and Acxiom's Real ID, now the identity layer inside Omnicom's own marketing platform, is one of the more capable examples of that shift. Publishers are moving the same way from the other end, leaning into their first-party data, and identity graph. The common thread is signal ownership — and the teams building on infrastructure they control are early to where the whole market is heading.
The teams that come out of 2026 ahead won't be the ones who found the fastest drop-in ID. They'll be the ones who stopped renting identity and stood up their own.
If you're mapping your exit, let's chat— we'll walk through replacing onboarding, targeting, and measurement on your own signal, on your stack.
Trip Foster is Co-founder and CRO of GrowthCode. GrowthCode provides identity and data infrastructure as-a-service for the digital advertising ecosystem.