Identity is the marketer's Rosetta Stone. Connect every touchpoint, or you measure none of them. And the death of the cookie made identity stronger.

Clinger joined LiveRamp in 2016. Before that he worked in healthcare, helping hospitals connect lab tests, vital signs, billing and surgical notes so they could better manage patient outcomes. He was based in Madison, Wisconsin, and as a Floridian he survived four winters before deciding it was time for a warmer place. LiveRamp in San Francisco was doing the same thing he cared about, taking disparate enterprise data and connecting it to consumer touchpoints to drive an outcome. It was a much smaller company then, about 140 people, with a culture he says still holds today.

In healthcare, a data team found that certain vitals plus certain lab results could predict a medical crisis, and knowing that intervention within a set number of hours improves the outcome, they built a protocol with the hospital. When he left Epic, he believes it was saving the equivalent of a 747 crashing every week in patient lives. LiveRamp does much the same for marketers, he says, taking the CRM, email and transaction data a business has always had and bringing it together to improve the outcome.

For Clinger the value is the breadth of conversations. LiveRamp sits at the centre of the ecosystem, working with over 300 partners to activate, optimise and measure brands' data, which lets him talk to TikTok, Meta, Netflix and OpenAI and see where consumer and marketing innovation are heading. The international lens adds depth, because a retailer in Australia is completely different to one in the US or the UK, with different cultural and privacy nuances, different consent regimes and different speeds of innovation. He describes LiveRamp as the neutral connectivity layer for the ecosystem.

Every market tells you how different it is, and Clinger's answer is yes, but. Australia is small, nimble and quick to run with new technology, the UK is right up there, and other markets are more conservative and prefer to move slowly and see things succeed first. Yet whether in Australia, the UK, Japan, Germany or Brazil, marketers all ask how they influence the consumer journey, how they connect in a way that feels genuine and trusted, how they optimise those connections and how they measure. Every marketer, he says, is throwing money into the ecosystem and needs to know what is performing and what delivers the best outcomes.

The real problem behind fragmentation and signal loss, Clinger argues, is guiding and influencing a consumer journey now scattered across touchpoints. A UK retailer's customer might see a YouTube ad, an out of home ad, display, TikTok, and now ask ChatGPT for a recipe that ties back to a shopping trip. Each touchpoint runs in its own world of identity, and this is where LiveRamp comes in as a Rosetta Stone, connecting the TikTok ID to the Ramp ID to the OpenAI ID to the YouTube ID. It is rare, he says, that a consumer sees a single ad and buys immediately. It is a sequence of events, and you have to connect the touchpoints.

The death of the cookie that never happened still spurred a lot of innovation, in Clinger's telling. In 2018 the industry was fragmented, cookies in display, the rise of mobile, connected TV that was unmeasurable, linear TV, and AI interfaces on the horizon. Today those platforms have embraced connectivity. OpenAI is connected in, Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime have become addressable, and a marketer can activate the same audience on the Financial Times, Netflix, TikTok and OpenAI. Ramp ID and The Trade Desk's UID2 are interoperable, and the cookie has stopped being the point.

Readiness varies by brand and industry, but Clinger sees striking momentum. OpenAI began advertising only a few months ago and thousands of brands have jumped in. The Netflix partnership, launched in the spring of last year, saw more brands sign up faster than any destination he had seen, quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing. Not all brands have it perfectly right, he admits, but every single one now understands the pace has forever changed, and they are all leaning in and testing.

A wave of startups in AI and ad tech is arguing that marketing workflows can be made agentic and more efficient, with humans in control but upleveled to higher-level tasks. At Cannes, LiveRamp launched Agent Builders, or LAB, to bring specialist agents into the ecosystem. One founding partner, Newton, built by ex-LiveRampers, made a hyper-specialised agent that runs measurement on a clean room so brands do it more easily and data scientists move up to higher-order work. LAB has four founding members, and everything in it is about getting today's workflows ready for a mostly agent-led world.

Internally, LiveRamp rolled out an AI certification program and released Claude CoWork to every team member, who use it to read and draft emails, get calendar briefings and better prep notes, with Glean for combing internal resources. Where finding the perfect old deck once took an hour of searching drives, an agent now finds it. When someone builds an agent they can share it, others tweak it, and it encourages collaboration. If you walked around the office, Clinger says, almost everyone is using CoWork for some part of their work.

This is core to the product, Clinger says. An enterprise holds data in one cloud or many, and wants to collaborate with brands whose data sits in their own clouds, so LiveRamp built a cloud agnostic product from the start. With AI it is the same problem, tying disparate data together in a permissioned, safe way and letting AI use it. LiveRamp sits as the AI infrastructure on top of the disparate data, letting brands bring their data together and connect it into agentic use cases or AI consumer experiences like OpenAI. Everything is built so clients can bring their own agents, and LAB is a neutral, MCP native marketplace, led out of the London office, for those not yet ready to.

Internationally, Clinger chose a verticalized structure over a country model, with a head of international operations, heads of solutions and regionalized sales leads, having previously run a country approach. The whole international leadership team is scattered globally but comes into London once a quarter for three days to review each market and give consolidated feedback to a globally run product team. The risk with many markets, he says, is one drifts off doing its own thing until two years later you are running different businesses. The goal is one global product with regional nuances, because clients want the EU five, Australia, Japan, Brazil and the US delivered seamlessly.

On maturity, Clinger reads the UK and Australia as the forefront, continental Europe a little behind, and MENA as leapfrogging the cookie era entirely. Ahead of the first Ramp Up Middle East in Dubai, registration was exceeded and the venue doubled before being capped at maximum size. He calls it one of the fastest-growing ad tech regions, with huge media spend, a digitally active population and Snap as a leading partner. Commerce works differently, with conglomerates owning the rights to global brands, and brands and publishers hold high expectations that make it an innovative market. Every time he drives there, something new is under construction.

Clinger points to airlines building commerce media, citing United Airlines, whose core business is moving people from A to B but which built a Connected Media Network around consumers on its app and passengers watching screens on planes. He calls the rollout fast, innovative and global, noting a captive audience on a flight is focused on those ads. He also praises L'Oréal for enabling local markets to innovate fast, so a market like Spain can run with a use case that fits the global mandate.

Clinger says he learns best in coffee conversations, peppering people with questions, and wants those starting out to have casual, in-person chats now that the industry is back from Zoom. He learns most from the 30-minute coffee chats or walking around London. His advice is two-fold: show up, be in the office and at events, and take on whatever challenge the company needs. He was told long ago never to say a problem is not yours. Solving one problem earns you another, and those problems are the path to career development and success.