Scott Howe, CEO of LiveRamp, traces his career from BCG and Avenue A/Razorfish through the aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft and into his current role leading LiveRamp.
Scott Howe's entry into advertising was accidental (00:05:03). A BCG yield management project for Qantas convinced him data would be the defining competitive advantage of the internet era. That conviction led him to Avenue A/Razorfish, where the team built Atlas, a buy-side ad server rivaling DoubleClick, then spun it off and sold it to competitors to maximize data scale (00:16:35).
The aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft closed in weeks after Google bought DoubleClick (00:30:55). Scott counts delivering the news to his team as one of his career highlights. Microsoft's display position was stronger than most remember (it included Facebook's ad inventory), but a strategic pivot to search led to a talent exodus that seeded much of modern ad tech, including Jeff Green founding The Trade Desk.
At LiveRamp, Scott has applied the same principles consistently: when cookie deprecation hit, he stood up a skunkworks team outside the normal org (led by co-host Ian Myers) (00:41:53). The same logic drove the Acxiom services spinoff and guides his acquisition playbook (00:53:31).
Key Takeaways
Data scale over protection: Spinning Atlas out and selling it to competitors produced better insights than keeping it as proprietary agency technology.
Acquisitions disperse talent and seed cycles: aQuantive and DoubleClick acted as dispersal events, sending people out to found the next generation of companies: The Trade Desk, Aggregate Knowledge, Rover, and others.
Org structure determines response speed: Walling off a small, fast-moving team was LiveRamp's key move when cookie deprecation hit, something a standard org chart couldn't accommodate.
Services and technology conflict as they mature: What starts as complementary eventually creates opposing incentives around margins, growth, and investment priorities.
Preserve acquisitions, don't absorb them: Give acquired teams more resources and a bigger canvas rather than breaking them apart and folding them in.
The Build with Mike O'Sullivan is a podcast produced by The Current which is owned and operated by The Trade Desk, Inc. Learn more: https://www.thecurrent.com/
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