The Death That Never Came
A decade at LiveRamp, from connecting hospital data to leading roughly 29 international markets, Clinger argues the data marketers need is already there, and the value is in connecting it.
"We sit as the AI infrastructure on top of all of the disparate data"
Travis Clinger is Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer and General Manager of International at LiveRamp, where he oversees the international business across roughly 29 markets and the partnerships that link brands, publishers, platforms, data partners and cloud systems. He is known for sitting at the centre of the ad tech ecosystem, working with over 300 partners, and for arguing that unified identity is the connective tissue of a fragmented consumer journey.
Before LiveRamp, Clinger worked in healthcare, where at Epic he helped hospitals bring together disparate records, lab tests, vital signs, billing and surgical notes, to better manage patient outcomes. He describes a protocol built from vitals and lab results that, by his account, was saving the equivalent of a 747 crashing every week in patient lives when he left. A self-described Floridian who survived four winters in Madison, Wisconsin, Clinger moved to San Francisco in 2016 to join LiveRamp, then a company of about 140 people, drawn by the same idea of connecting data to outcomes.
Over a decade at LiveRamp, Clinger built up the ecosystem work before adding the international role about 18 to 19 months ago. He now leads a verticalized international organisation that pulls its leadership team into London each quarter to keep one global product with regional nuances, and he is scaling the business into fast-growing regions, including the Middle East, where the company held its first Ramp Up event in Dubai. He champions LiveRamp Agent Builders and internal tools like Claude CoWork as the on-ramp to an agent-led future.
The death of the cookie spurred the industry to interoperable identity
"I learn the most from the 30-minute coffee chats or walking around London."
Clinger rates informal, in-person conversation above almost any other source of insight. He describes himself as the first to pepper a partner with questions, and worries that the Zoom habit robbed those starting out of casual learning. Reading and podcasts help, he says, but the real learning happens in the unstructured chats.
"I would say be in the office five days a week, even if it's not required."
Clinger's career advice is unfashionably blunt: turn up and take on whatever the company needs. He was told never to call a problem someone else's, and he treats each solved problem as the entry point to the next. Those problems, in his framing, are the path to career development, and showing up is the fuel that gets you there.
"We're that neutral connectivity layer for the ecosystem"
Clinger positions LiveRamp as the neutral point at the centre of the ecosystem rather than a competitor to any platform. That neutrality, he argues, is what lets the company connect identities across TikTok, Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI and give marketers a single view of a fragmented journey. He treats being cloud agnostic and agent agnostic as core to that promise.
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