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Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer at LiveRamp dives deeper into the latest martech and adtech innovations that are impacting modern day marketing and advertising in this MarTech Series Interview:
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Hi Travis, take us through your B2B tech journey and role at LiveRamp.
I started my career in healthcare software on the consulting side, where I was able to learn firsthand about systems managing sensitive information.
I came over to LiveRamp in 2016 to focus on connecting the world’s data to the world’s use cases – while still keeping it protected. Since then, as the adtech ecosystem has continued to grow, so too has my focus, and I deeply enjoy the building and experimenting that goes into connecting advertisers to everywhere their customers are.
As Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer and GM, International at LiveRamp, I spearhead LiveRamp’s global digital advertising ecosystem strategy and oversee our international markets: this includes driving strategic initiatives, advancing global partnerships, scaling our international business, and overseeing the business development and go-to-market strategies for key products and initiatives, as well as activation partnerships spanning media, CTV, martech, AI, and beyond.
This can include everything from working with a grocery/fuel/pharmacy/convenience leader like Giant Eagle to unify its measurement across paid and owned channels – including email – to helping marketers connect with emerging destinations like Perplexity to power sponsored experiences inside AI search.
Can we hear more about LiveRamp’s connectivity strategy?
At the highest level, our connectivity strategy is to build the world’s largest addressable and measurable collaboration network across every must-have consumer experience.
You might key in on the word “addressability” there, but for some people, that conjures outdated images of using third-party cookies or other solutions for things like display advertising. Consumers are reachable via so many other channels – martech being one underutilized channel itself, in particular, email and SMS – and consumers expect to have one unified experience across all of them. Marketers have to deliver this experience and make sure that every step of the consumer journey is personalized, relevant, and adding value so that consumers can continue to deepen the relationship with them.
This is what we mean when we talk about omnichannel. Marketers need to have one unified view of their customer and every touchpoint with their brand, in order to better provide value and market to these customers. They want to target and segment, and then seamlessly activate across all of the places where their target customer is spending their time, which requires ecosystem connectivity. What many people don’t think about is that connectivity also makes measurement possible, so that marketers can make informed, real-time decisions about their investments, and get the most out of their spend.
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How are some of LiveRamp’s most recent enhancements enabling end users in the martech, adtech ecosystem?
I mentioned Giant Eagle earlier – they’re a partner of ours that’s really innovating when it comes to connectivity into martech. When Giant Eagle wanted to quantify its measurement and campaign optimization capabilities for advertisers, it wanted to bring email – including clicks, opens, and impressions – and its paid channels into its unified customer view.
The way Giant Eagle is leveraging LiveRamp is innovative, but undergirding everything is LiveRamp’s RampID, which is the most durable identifier for connecting the ecosystem. Giant Eagle started leveraging RampID for a comprehensive, connected view across marketing efforts, but RampID has been around for years as a pillar of LiveRamp’s authenticated ecosystem.
We’re constantly adding scale to our authenticated ecosystem, whether it’s adding more publisher domains to the 21,000 domains that already leverage our authenticated identity, or enabling connectivity via RampID into CTV, mobile in-app, and more to enable the omnichannel marketing that brands want.
What are some of the things that you’ve been hearing from marketers about martech, or adtech more broadly?
I can’t reinforce this enough – marketers want an omnichannel experience. They want a unified view of consumers, and connectivity across every channel.
Marketers can drive better omnichannel marketing than ever before leveraging authenticated identity to create a unified view of their customers, that understands all touchpoints a consumer has with them. From there, they can personalize each consumer touchpoint for maximum personalization and engagement. And critically, authenticated impressions are measurable impressions, giving marketers better insight into what’s working across all channels, and enabling them to optimize their strategies in real time.
When it comes to martech, channels like email and SMS are no longer siloed and can be optimized alongside every other channel, helping marketers to maximize personalization of these touchpoints, as well as to power better measurement that can be fed back into better marketing.
What top trends will shape the martech and adtech ecosystem as AI becomes more crucial to the landscape?
First, connectivity into AI experiences. Marketers want to personalize and measure AI experiences alongside every other experience where their consumers are spending time. I’m focused on adding rapidly evolving AI destinations – such as Perplexity, which we’ve already announced with – to our data collaboration network. Marketers using LiveRamp will be able to seamlessly activate on Perplexity’s authenticated inventory, enabling better reach, seamless activation, and deeper personalization across devices and channels. As the proliferation of AI-enabled channels increases, like further AI search engines, or through different experiences like ChatGPT and other assistants and chatbots, providing marketers with connectivity, flexibility, and interoperability here will be part of continuing to enable the omnichannel marketing they need.
Second, powering stronger AI tools. There are a lot of different AI tools in-market that do a range of different things – but many of these tools need data collaboration, whether that’s breaking down silos using an ID, or using a clean room to understand holistic campaign performance, in order to drive maximum impact. One recent example of this is Chalice, which enables marketers to use their Custom Algorithms to build better-performing audiences using AI – LiveRamp helps to enable these AI-powered audiences to be activated across social platforms like Meta and YouTube. Another just-announced example of this is Scope3, which powers AI-enabled media products. A critical part of better-performing AI is data, and LiveRamp helps connect high-quality data needed to power these smarter AI agents.
A few daily best practices you’d share with modern marketers and advertisers before we wrap up?
Knowing that your readers can come from different parts of the ecosystem, I want to issue some challenges or questions that they should be asking of themselves, rather than specific daily best practices.
First, they should constantly be challenging themselves to build sustainably and with consumers at their core. For example, I think some parts of the ecosystem might feel like the pressure has been lifted, now that Chrome has taken away its firm end-date for third-party cookies. But thinking this way overlooks the fact that so much of marketing is now cookieless – like Safari, Firefox, Edge, and a growing portion of Chrome – or never used third-party cookies to begin with, like CTV, mobile in-app, and more. Building around first-party data and authenticated identity puts relationships with consumers at the center.
Next, they should constantly be challenging themselves to think of the future. When we think about things like AI search, this didn’t exist five years ago – but it will completely change how consumers interact with an entire type of marketing. If you’re not focusing on omnichannel, or building using outdated tools like third-party cookies as a pillar of your strategy, you’re ill-equipping yourself to work in these newer channels – or channels that haven’t even been invented yet. We’re at an exciting time in our industry, but the only way to take advantage is to build with tools that allow the flexibility and interoperability that you’ll need for high performance now and in the future.
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About LiveRampAbout TravisAbout LiveRamp
LiveRamp is the data collaboration platform for the world’s most innovative companies. A leader in consumer privacy, data ethics, and foundational identity, LiveRamp sets the new standard for building a connected customer view with unmatched clarity and context while protecting brand and consumer trust.
About Travis
Travis Clinger, is Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer at LiveRamp
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