From tighter budgets to fragmented data, today’s marketers face no shortage of challenges.
Stricter privacy regulations, the rise of walled gardens, and the expansion of media and channel options uniquely impact the buyer’s journey. Many shoppers now conduct their research across multiple channels. The channel where they decide to purchase could be entirely different from where they started. These behaviors continue to shape how marketers understand and engage with their audiences.
Despite these headwinds, marketers still need to drive results. But where should they start?
Marketers can tap into data collaboration strategies to improve media planning, campaign performance, incrementality, measurement, and return on ad spend (ROAS) – all while respecting consumer privacy.
The Value of Data Collaboration
Our customers frequently discuss the value of data collaboration to their businesses, and we sought a way to quantify that benefit. We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the return on investment (ROI) companies may realize with the LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform.
We’re thrilled to highlight some of the findings.
The study, released in June 2025, revealed that a composite organization representative of interviewed customers using the LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform for marketing use cases achieved a 313% return on investment and $9.6 million in business benefits over three years, with a payback period of less than 6 months.
Over three years, their investment translated into substantial growth and efficiency:
One customer interviewed, the head of media transformation at a financial services firm, explained, “We’ve positioned [LiveRamp] as a nonnegotiable piece of our adtech infrastructure … We’ve saved millions of dollars from cutting waste, ensuring our ad placements are targeted to the right people, and buying higher-quality data versus what we used to buy. LiveRamp provides a critical service. I don’t think that you could do advertising without it, certainly not programmatic.”
LiveRamp: The Marketer’s Path to Efficiency & Effectiveness
After investing in LiveRamp, the organizations interviewed saw better media efficiency and effectiveness across all media channels. For the study, the composite spent 15% of its media budget on retail media networks, with the rest spent on non-retail media, including programmatic, search, social, linear TV, and connected TV (CTV).
Their teams achieved operational efficiencies in media activation, improved data governance workflows, improved brand perception, and strengthened relationships with agencies, retailers, and publishers.
Over three years, the quantified benefits included:
- Paid media budget efficiency. LiveRamp boosted non-retail media budget efficiency by improving audience targeting, campaign frequency, data quality, and ad placements. By Year 3, this led to a 15% budget savings, worth $6.1 million over three years.
- Incremental paid media performance growth. The company tracked its paid media performance using LiveRamp. In Year 3, ad spend efficiency improved by 5%. This added $18 million in revenue over a three-year period.
- Retail media network budget efficiency. By working with key retail partners in the LiveRamp Clean Room, exposure and transaction data were matched to spot budget inefficiencies and cut waste. By Year 3, this boosted efficiency by 20%, saving $1.2 million over three years.
- Incremental retail media performance growth. Similar to its paid media channels, the composite measured an increasing percentage of its retail media spend annually. The composite return per dollar of ad spend grew 10% by Year 3. Over three years, this contributed $8.8 million in incremental revenue.
- Media activation operational efficiency. LiveRamp accelerated the composite’s data integration and distribution workflows. This allowed audience segments to be built within the platform and federated to publishers, rather than rebuilding audiences for each publisher as in its prior environment. By Year 3, this resulted in a 50% time savings for team members involved in media activation activities, worth $215,000 over three years.
The marketing manager of technology and innovation at a travel organization said: “The ease of pushing the information out to new destinations is pretty significant. LiveRamp has been really phenomenal in working with us on migrating our existing data feeds that are coming from somewhat of a manual process … they’ve helped us understand how to better organize the data and utilize it within their system. LiveRamp tends to be trusted within our organization through privacy and IT a lot more than other platforms.”
The study also highlighted some unquantified benefits that provided additional value to the composite organization:
- Improved brand perception. As brands enhanced segmentation and targeting, and gained a more accurate understanding of their audience and buying journey, media campaigns resonated more effectively with consumers, boosting brand perception.
- Better relationships with agencies, retailers, and publishers. LiveRamp improved data accessibility, enabling key partners to spend less time identifying the most accurate data, leaving more time for strategic media planning discussions.
- Improved media planning. Instead of waiting to receive disjointed outputs from various publishers, brands engaged in more frequent, informed campaign planning by accessing historical performance insights stored within LiveRamp.
- Improved data governance to avoid potential revenue loss and legal costs. LiveRamp’s embedded identity resolution eliminates the need for brands to send hashed customer data directly to partners. This reduced the risk of outsiders intercepting and accessing personally identifiable information (PII) and helped prevent a potential decline in customer trust and, consequently, revenue.
A senior analytics director in specialty CPG interviewed for the study went further to describe the power of data, “Our first-party data sat in our customer data platform (CDP) and didn’t go anywhere else. Once we changed that, we haven’t looked back. I think the key is to make others understand it doesn’t matter if it’s first-party or someone else’s data. We treat it with the same respect, and the same laws apply. We can find ways to be productive with data through collaboration.”
Marketers Harness the Power of the Network
The bottom line is that marketers today can’t afford to guess. Making the most of data is the key to getting results.
A VP of data-driven experiences at a personal care and beauty brand who was interviewed for this study summarized the value of our powerful data collaboration network, “I view the LiveRamp relationship as the only conduit to getting the 90 million people in our database into the ecosystem [ethically] … We knew that all of our partners and retailers were investing in LiveRamp, as well. Having that kind of common currency across the ecosystem was important.”
To our customers who agreed to be interviewed for this study, thank you. We value your time and are thrilled at the value you’ve seen. We believe the results from this study reflect the work we routinely deliver to our customers.
We are proud to be the leading data collaboration partner, empowering brands, publishers, and platforms to deliver exceptional experiences and drive measurable performance everywhere it matters with the world’s most powerful data collaboration network. We will continue to invest in how our platform helps marketers unlock greater efficiencies, deeper insights, and better outcomes throughout the customer journey.
Be sure to read the Total Economic Impact of LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform to dive into the results and methodology. Set up a call with our team to learn how you can grow your business with LiveRamp today.