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Scott Howe
The CEO of LiveRamp has been quietly rewiring how the world's biggest brands collaborate on customer data through three platform shifts. He is in the middle of the fourth.
The CEO of LiveRamp has been quietly rewiring how the world's biggest brands collaborate on customer data through three platform shifts. He is in the middle of the fourth.
Scott Howe is on his third tour of duty in the same industry, and every time he has come back the rules have changed. He runs LiveRamp from a tower at 225 Bush Street in San Francisco, where a 1,400-person company sits between every major brand in the world and the data that decides which customer sees which ad. That work used to depend on third-party cookies. Cookies are now in palliative care. Howe's job is to make sure his customers don't go with them.
His pitch sounds like contrarianism until you sit with it for a minute. Marketers have spent twenty years chasing the so-called golden record - one beautiful, perfect, complete profile of every consumer. Howe thinks the golden record was always a fantasy. Signal fragments, regulators tighten, walled gardens close, devices multiply. The honest move is to give up on perfect and get very good at connected: clean rooms, identity resolution, consented collaboration. Plug the messy data you actually have into the messy data your partner actually has, agree on the math, and decide together.
LiveRamp's customers are the largest advertisers, publishers, retailers, and media networks on earth. The product is unglamorous on purpose. It is the wiring under the floor of modern marketing, and Howe likes it that way. The unglamorous companies are the ones that survive a platform shift.
1999 to 2007. Howe spends eight years at aQuantive in Seattle, helping build Avenue A | Razorfish into the largest digital agency on the planet. Also runs DRIVE Performance Media and Atlas, the adserving technology Facebook later acquires.
2007 to 2010. Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Advertising Business Group. Manages search, display, ad networks, in-game, mobile, digital cable. A multi-billion-dollar line of business at the moment online advertising goes mainstream.
2011 onward. Joins Acxiom as CEO. In 2014 Acxiom buys a small startup called LiveRamp. In 2018 he sells off the rest of Acxiom and the company is renamed LiveRamp. He has been running it since October 1 of that year.
Analyst at Kidder, Peabody & Company. Then The Boston Consulting Group. A yield management project there convinced him data was the defining edge of the internet era.
aQuantive. Executive and corporate officer. Runs Avenue A | Razorfish, DRIVE Performance Media, and Atlas International.
Corporate VP, Microsoft Advertising Business Group. All emerging online ad businesses report up.
Named CEO and President of Acxiom, a 50-year-old data services company headquartered in Arkansas.
Acxiom acquires LiveRamp. Fast Company names Howe one of the world's Most Creative People in business.
Acxiom Marketing Solutions is sold to IPG. The remaining company is renamed LiveRamp, with Howe as CEO.
Honored with the IAB Service Excellence Award for visionary industry leadership.
Featured speaker at Advertising Week New York. Continues the public tour of the connected-data thesis.
Running LiveRamp from 225 Bush Street, San Francisco. Public company. Profitable. Still building.
"The winners are going to be the ones who connect the silos, who realize everything is connected and bring the right information together at a moment in time."
"Consumers get it. They don't want their data to be a commodity that's traded back and forth between everyone. They're going to give their permissions to the companies they trust."
A.B. in Economics // Magna cum laude
Master of Business Administration
An Ivy League economist turned consultant turned operator. The unusual part is that he made the bet on data while still at BCG, before there were words for it.
Named to the list of the world's Most Creative People in business, for reframing what a data services company could be at Acxiom and pulling LiveRamp into the fold the same year.
Honored for visionary industry leadership. The IAB's recognition tracks with what customers have been saying privately for years: LiveRamp is the connective tissue under modern advertising.
A yield management project at The Boston Consulting Group convinced a young Howe that data, not media, was going to be the defining competitive advantage of the internet era. He has spent every job since proving the thesis.
Howe joined Acxiom in 2011. In 2014, Acxiom acquired LiveRamp. In 2018, he sold the rest of Acxiom and kept LiveRamp's name on the door. The acquired startup ate the parent.
Agency. Platform. Infrastructure. Razorfish, then Microsoft, then LiveRamp. Howe keeps showing up at the layer where the next reorganization is about to happen.
While most ad tech CEOs spent 2020 to 2024 in defensive posture about the death of the third-party cookie, Howe was telling investors it was the best thing that could happen to his company. The math is starting to back him up.
Howe on the Innovation Junkies Podcast, on how enterprise leaders combine data and innovation - and why customers and people are the two wells worth drawing from.
Howe on The Current, walking through ad tech's cycles of innovation and how LiveRamp positions for each one. A useful primer on the connected-data thesis.