LiveRamp Holdings Inc

LiveRamp Holdings, Inc. ("LiveRamp", "we", "us", or the "Company") is a global technology company that helps companies build enduring brand and business value by collaborating responsibly with data. A groundbreaking leader in consumer privacy, data ethics and foundational identity, LiveRamp offers a connected customer view with clarity and context while protecting brand and consumer trust. Our best-in-class enterprise platform enables data collaboration, where companies can share first-party consumer data with trusted business partners securely and in a privacy conscious manner. We offer flexibility to collaborate wherever data lives to support a wide range of data collaboration use cases—within organizations, between brands, and across our global network of premier partners. Global innovators, from iconic consumer brands and tech platforms to retailers, financial services, and healthcare leaders, turn to LiveRamp to deepen customer engagement and loyalty, activate new partnerships, and maximize the value of their first-party data while staying on the forefront of rapidly evolving compliance and privacy requirements.

LiveRamp is a Delaware corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Our common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “RAMP.” We serve a global customer base from locations in the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific (“APAC”) region. Our direct customer list includes many of the world’s best-known and most innovative brands across most major industry verticals, including but not limited to financial, insurance and investment services, retail, automotive, telecommunications, high tech, consumer packaged goods, healthcare, travel, entertainment and non-profit. Through our expansive partner ecosystem we serve thousands of additional companies, unlocking access to unique customer moments and creating powerful network effects.

Industry

We are experiencing a convergence of several key industry trends that are shaping the future of how data is used to power the customer experience economy. Some of these key industry trends include:

Marketing and Customer Experience in the Data-Driven Era

As the world becomes more multichannel, consumer behavior is rapidly shifting, and organizations are increasingly realizing that true competitive advantage lies in providing meaningful customer experiences – experiences that are personalized, relevant and cohesive across all channels and interactions. Experience is the key to brand differentiation and customer retention. Companies that fail to prioritize customer experience as a strategic growth initiative will simply get left behind. Companies are also increasingly realizing that best-in-class customer experiences require enhanced insights that can only be achieved through a structured data collaboration effort that combines first- and second-party data.

At the same time, consumer expectations are also at an all-time high. Consumers are demanding personalization from brands and, in this new area, every consumer interaction has the potential to be individually relevant, addressable, and measurable.

Data is at the center of exceptional customer experiences but is still vastly underutilized. Organizations must capture, analyze, understand – and, most importantly use – customer data to power the customer experience. By understanding which devices, email addresses, and postal addresses relate to the same individual, enterprise marketers can leverage that insight to deliver seamless experiences as consumers engage with a company across all touchpoints. At the same time, by reaching consumers at the individual level, organizations can reduce marketing waste and more easily attribute their marketing spend to actual results. Enterprise marketers recognize the huge opportunity big data brings, yet many admit they are not using their data effectively to drive their customer experience.

Growing Data Usage

Advances in software, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the consumer's growing use of Internet connected devices and applications have made it possible to collect and rapidly process massive amounts of customer data. Data vendors and direct-to-consumer platforms are able to collect user information across a wide range of offline and online properties and connected devices, and to aggregate and combine it with other data sources. With proper permissions, this data can be integrated with a company's own proprietary data and can be made non-identifiable if the use case requires it. Through the use of data, marketers and publishers can more effectively acquire customers, elevate their lifetime value, and enhance the customer experience.

Growing Data Collaboration to Enable Commerce Media

The advertising market is being transformed by commerce media, a new form of advertising that closes the loop between media impressions and sales transactions. Commerce media provides brand advertisers with enhanced audience insights that drive more effective and efficient advertising and provides consumers with a more relevant experience. The foundation for commerce media is data collaboration where companies share first-party consumer data with trusted business partners in a manner that is safe, secure and adheres to privacy regulations. Retail media was the first to scale, spurred by e-commerce, but other sectors are embracing the commerce media opportunity, including travel & hospitality, telecommunications, finance, automotive and healthcare. Other examples of data collaboration use cases include enterprise companies connecting consumer data across functional groups or properties, cross-screen media measurement and analysis, and closed loop attribution from connecting marketing exposures to actual sales.

Growing Complexity of the Customer Journey

The customer experience economy has evolved significantly in recent years, driven by rapid innovation and an explosion of data, marketing channels, devices, and applications. Historically, brands interacted with consumers through a limited number of marketing channels, with limited visibility into the activities taking place. Today, companies interact with consumers across a growing number of touchpoints, including online, social, mobile and point-of-sale. The billions of interactions that take place each day between brands and consumers create a trove of valuable data that can be harnessed to power better customer interactions and experiences. However, most enterprise marketers remain unable to navigate through the complexity to effectively leverage this data.

Additionally, innovation has fueled the growth of a highly-fragmented technology landscape, forcing companies to contend with thousands of marketing technologies and data silos. To make every customer experience relevant across channels and devices, organizations need a trusted platform that can break down those silos, make data portable, and accurately recognize individuals throughout the customer journey. Marketing is becoming more audience-centric, automated, and optimized. However, several important factors still prevent data from being used effectively to optimize the customer experience:

•Identity. For organizations to target audiences at the individual level, they must be able to recognize consumers across all channels and devices, and link multiple identifiers and data elements to create a single view of the customer. The evolving regulations around consumer data privacy highlight the importance of authenticated, first-party identity.

•Scaled Data Assets. Quality, depth, and recency of data matter when deriving linkages between identifiers. Organizations must have access to an extensive set of data and be able to match that data with a high degree of accuracy to perform true cross-device audience addressability and measurement.

•Connectivity. The fragmented marketing landscape creates a need for a common network of integrations that make it easy and safe to connect and activate data anywhere in the ecosystem.

•Data Control. Organizations are increasingly looking to collaborate with their most important partners but do not want to give up control of their data or, in certain cases, do not want their data to leave their environment.

•Walled Gardens. Walled gardens, or marketing platforms that strictly control the use of data outside of their walls, are becoming more pervasive and can result in diminished control and transparency for brand advertisers. For customers, it can result in a disjointed user experience. Organizations need a solution that enables an open ecosystem and ensures complete control over customer data, along with the flexibility to choose a diversified approach to meeting marketing goals.

•Data Governance. Preserving brand integrity while delivering positive customer experiences is a top priority for every company. Organizations must be able to manage large sets of complex data ethically, securely, within legal boundaries, and in a way that protects consumers from harm. Importantly, they must also honor consumer preferences and put procedures in place that enable individuals to control how, when and for what reasons companies collect and use information about them.

Increasing Fragmentation of Consumer Identity

Today, customer journeys span multiple channels and devices over time, resulting in data silos and fragmented identities. As consumers engage with brands across various touchpoints – over the web, mobile devices and applications, by email and television, and in physical stores – they may not be represented as single unique individuals with complex behaviors, appearing instead as disparate data points with dozens of different identifiers. Becky Smith who lives at 123 Main Street may appear as beckys@acme.com when she uses Facebook, becky@yahoo.com when she signs into Yahoo Finance, becky.smith@gmail.com when she conducts a Google search, cookie ABC when she browses cnn.com, device ID 234 on Hulu and so on. As a result, enterprise marketers struggle to understand the cross-channel, cross-device habits of consumers and the different steps they take on their path to conversion. More specifically, data silos and fragmented identities prevent companies from being able to resolve all relevant data to a specific individual; this poses a challenge to the formation of accurate, actionable insights about a brand’s consumers or campaigns.

Marketing Waste from Inaccurate Consumer Identification

Every day, brands spend billions of dollars on advertising and marketing, yet many of the messages they deliver are irrelevant, repetitive, mistimed, or simply reach the wrong audience. In addition, as the marketing landscape continues to grow and splinter across a growing array of online and offline channels, it is increasingly difficult to attribute marketing spend to a measurable outcome, such as an in-store visit or sale. Wasted marketing spend is largely driven by the fragmented ecosystem of brands, data providers, marketing applications, media providers, and agencies that are involved in the marketing process, but operate without cohesion. Without a common understanding of consumer identity to unify otherwise siloed data, brands are unable to define accurate audience segments and derive insights that would enable better decision making.

Heightened Privacy and Security Concerns

In the era of regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") and the California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA"), diligence in the areas of consumer privacy and security is and will continue to be paramount. Every year there are new consumer data privacy regulations being introduced. For example, new comprehensive privacy legislation, similar to the CCPA, has taken, or will take, effect in at least sixteen states on or by January 1, 2026. Additional new category-specific legislation, such as the My Health, My Data Act passed in Washington State in April 2023, will also take effect in the next year or two. Consumers' understanding of the benefits of marketing technology often lags the pace of innovation, giving rise to new demands from government agencies and consumer advocacy groups across the world. These factors challenge the liability every company faces when managing and activating consumer data.

Our Approach

Leveraging our groundbreaking leadership in consumer privacy, data ethics, foundational identity and connectivity, we help our customers build enduring brand and business value by unlocking siloed and fragmented consumer data and enabling responsible data collaboration.

We are middleware for the customer experience economy. LiveRamp provides the trusted platform that sits in between customer data and the thousands of applications powered by data. We make data consistent, consumable and portable. We ensure the seamless connection of data to and from the customer experience applications our customers use and the partners with which they collaborate. We empower businesses to make data more accessible and create richer, more meaningful experiences for their customers.

/LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform

As depicted in the graphic below, we power the industry’s leading enterprise platform for data collaboration. We enable organizations to access and leverage data more effectively across the applications they use to interact with their customers. At the core of our platform is an omnichannel, deterministic identity resolution technology that offers unparalleled accuracy, breadth, and depth. Leveraging deep expertise in data collaboration, the /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform enables an organization to unify customer and prospect data (first-, second-, or third-party) to build a single view of the customer in a way that protects consumer privacy. First-party data is data collected firsthand through a company's controlled channels. Second-party data is data that a company shares directly with a trusted business partner. Third-party data is data collected and sold by a company through an online data marketplace to companies with which it does not have a direct relationship. This single customer view can then be connected across any of the 500 partners in our ecosystem in order to support a variety of people-based marketing solutions.

The /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform provides customers with four core capabilities:

•Live/Identity. We provide enterprise identity infrastructure that resolves disparate consumer identities across different internal and external systems to create an accurate, connected view of the customer. Our approach to identity is built from two complementary graphs, combining offline data and online data and providing accuracy with a focus on privacy. LiveRamp technology for directly identifiable information (or "DII") gives brands and platforms the ability to connect and update what they know about consumers, resolving DII across enterprise databases and systems to deliver better customer experiences. Our digital identity graph, powered by our Authenticated Traffic Solution (or "ATS"), associates pseudonymous device IDs, TV IDs and other online customer IDs from premium publishers, platforms or data providers, around a RampIDTM, a durable and privacy-centric connector to the digital ecosystem. This provides marketers with a consistent view of the consumer that is necessary for personalized segmentation, targeting, and measurement. There are currently more than 165 supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms live or committed to bid on RampID and ATS. In addition, to date more than 21,000 publisher domains and 75% of the comScore 100 publishers have integrated ATS worldwide.

•Live/Access. Our Data Marketplace provides customers with simplified access to industry-leading third-party data providers globally. The /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform allows for the search, discovery and distribution of data provided by third-party data providers to improve targeting, measurement, and customer intelligence. Data accessed through the LiveRamp Data Marketplace is connected via RampID and is utilized to enrich our customers’ first-party data and can be leveraged across technology and media platforms, agencies, analytics environments, and TV partners. Our platform also provides tools for data providers to manage the organization, distribution, and operation of their data and services across our network of customers and partners. Today we work with more than 200 data providers across all verticals and data types (see below for discussion on Marketplace and Other).

•Live/Connectivity. We enable organizations to leverage their customer and prospect data in the digital and TV ecosystems and across the customer experience applications they use through a safe and secure data matching process called data onboarding. Our technology ingests a customer’s first-party data, removes all DII, and replaces it with a pseudonymized RampID. RampID can then be distributed through direct integrations to the top platforms our customers work with, including leading marketing cloud providers, publishers and social networks, personalization tools, and connected TV services. We connect data across an ecosystem of more than 500 partners, representing one of the largest networks of connections in the digital marketplace.

•Live/Insights. Data Collaboration enables advanced measurement and analytics that helps produce insight-driven innovation. We enable trusted data collaboration between organizations and their trusted partners in a neutral, manageable environment. Our platform provides customers with collaborative opportunities to safely and securely build a more accurate, dynamic view of their customers by leveraging partner data. We power more accurate, more complete measurement with the measurement vendors and partners our customers use. Our platform allows customers to combine disparate data files, typically advertising exposure and customer sales transactions, replacing customer identifiers with RampID. Customers then can use that aggregated view of each customer to measure reach and frequency, sales lift, closed loop offline-to-online conversion and cross-channel attribution.

Subscription

We primarily charge for our platform services on an annual basis. Our subscription pricing is based primarily on data volume, which is a function of data input records and connection points.

Our solutions are sold to enterprise marketers and the companies they partner with to execute their marketing, including agencies, marketing technology providers, publishers and data providers. Today, we work with 900 direct customers world-wide, including approximately 25% of the Fortune 500, and serve thousands of additional customers indirectly through our reseller partnership arrangements.

•Brands and Agencies. We work with over 500 of the largest brands and agencies in the world, helping them execute people-based marketing by creating an omni-channel understanding of the consumer and activating that understanding across their choice of best-of-breed digital marketing platforms.

•Marketing Technology Providers. We provide marketing technology providers with the identity foundation required to offer people-based targeting, measurement and personalization within their platforms. This adds value for brands by increasing reach, as well as the speed at which they can activate their marketing data.

•Publishers. We enable publishers of any size to offer people-based marketing on their properties. This adds value for brands by providing direct access to their customers and prospects in the publisher's premium inventory.

•Data Sellers. Leveraging our vast network of integrations, we enable data sellers to easily connect to the digital ecosystem and monetize their own data. Data can be distributed to customers or made available through the Data Marketplace. This adds value for brands as it allows them to augment their understanding of consumers and increase both their reach against and understanding of customers and prospects.

Marketplace and Other

As we have scaled the LiveRamp network and technology, we have found additional ways to leverage our platform, deliver more value to customers and create incremental revenue streams. Leveraging our common identity system and broad integration network, the Data Marketplace seamlessly connects data sellers’ audience data across the marketing ecosystem. The Data Marketplace enables data sellers to easily monetize their data across hundreds of marketing platforms and publishers. At the same time, it provides a single platform where data buyers, including platforms and publishers, in addition to brands and their agencies, access third-party data from more than 200 data providers, supporting all industries and encompassing all types of data. Data providers include sources and brands exclusive to LiveRamp, emerging platforms with access to previously unavailable deterministic data, and data partnerships enabled by our platform.

We generate revenue from the Data Marketplace primarily through revenue-sharing arrangements with data sellers that are monetizing their data assets via our marketplace platform service. We also generate Marketplace and Other revenue through transactional usage-based arrangements with certain publishers and addressable TV providers. Data Marketplace revenue is recognized net of the share of revenue earned by the data seller.

To complement our product offering, we provide professional services and enhanced support entitlements to help customers leverage our platform and drive business outcomes. Our services offering includes product implementation, data science analytics, audience measurement and general advisory. We generate revenue from services primarily from project fees paid by subscribers to our software platform. Service projects are sold on an ad hoc basis as well as bundled with platform subscriptions. Professional services revenue is approximately 3% of total Company revenue.

Competitive Strengths

Our competitive strengths can be mapped back to our core capabilities around data access, identity, connectivity and data stewardship – which together create strong network effects that form a larger strategic moat around the entire business.

•Premier Global Ecosystem. We offer an expansive, data-rich network of top-quality partners for incomparable scale and reach. We activate data across an ecosystem of more than 500 partners, representing one of the largest networks of connections in the digital marketing space. We use 100% deterministic matching, resulting in a strong combination of reach and accuracy. Additionally, through our Data Marketplace, we provide simplified access to more than 700,000 consumer data segments from the world's top data providers.

•Most Advanced Consumer-Level Recognition. Our proprietary, patented recognition technology draws upon an extensive historical reference base to identify and link together multiple consumer records and identifiers. We use the pioneering algorithms of AbiliTec® and deterministic digital matching to link individuals and households to the right digital identifiers including cookies, mobile device IDs, Advanced TV IDs, and user accounts at social networks. As a result, we are able to match online and offline data with a high degree of speed and accuracy.

•Groundbreaking Leadership in Privacy and Security. LiveRamp is a standard bearer in consumer privacy and data stewardship. We have been a strong and vocal proponent of providing consumers with more visibility and control over their data. A few examples of our commitment in this area:

◦In all of our major geographies we have privacy teams focused on the protection and responsible use of consumer data;

◦We provide a privacy-enabled environment that allows marketers and partners to connect different types of data while protecting and governing its use; and

◦We have industry-leading expertise in connecting data across the online and offline worlds.

•Scale Leader in Data Connectivity. We are a category creator and one of the largest providers of data connectivity at scale. We match records with a high level of accuracy and offer the flexibility for activating data through our extensive set of integrations. Our platform processes more than 4 trillion data records daily.

•Flexible Collaboration. We have flexibility to collaborate wherever data lives, enabling the widest possible range of data collaboration use cases. We bring our technology to the customer’s data environment and can collaborate with cloud providers or across clouds. We offer broad configurability, controls and permissioning to meet varying customer requirements. Our platform is extensible and scalable to meet growing collaboration usage.

•Uniquely Neutral in the Marketing Ecosystem. We are one of the only open and neutral data connectivity platforms operating at large scale. We provide the data connectivity required to build best-of-breed integrated marketing stacks, allowing our customers to innovate through their preferred choice of data, technology, and services providers. We strive to make every customer experience application more valuable. We enable the open marketing stack and power the open ecosystem.

•Strong Customer Relationships. We work with 900 direct customers world-wide and serve thousands of additional customers indirectly through our partner and reseller network. We have deep relationships with companies and marketing leaders in key industries, including financial services, retail, telecommunications, media, insurance, health care, automotive, technology, and travel and entertainment. Our customers are loyal and typically grow their use of the platform over time, as evidenced by our growth in the number of customers whose subscription contracts exceed $1 million in annual revenue.

Growth Strategy

LiveRamp is a category creator, thought leader and innovator in how data is used to power the customer experience. Key elements of our growth strategy include:

•Grow our Customer Base. We have strong relationships with many of the world’s largest brands, agencies, marketing technology providers, publishers and data providers. Today, we work with 900 direct customers globally; however, we believe our target market includes the world’s top 2,000 marketers, signaling there is still significant opportunity to add new customers to our roster. We expect to continue making investments in growing our sales and customer success team to support this strategy.

•Expand Existing Customer Relationships. A key growth lever for our business is the ability to land and expand – or grow existing customer relationships. Our subscription pricing is based on data volume, so over time, as customers expand their usage and leverage their data across more use cases, we are able to grow our relationships. As of March 31, 2024, we worked with 115 customers whose subscription contracts exceed $1 million in annual revenue, and as we continue to expand our coverage beyond programmatic, we expect to see this number grow.

•Expand Sales Channel Partnerships. A growth opportunity for our business is forging sales partnerships and product integrations with adjacent technology platforms and service providers. We are actively expanding our channel sales efforts with customer data platforms, public cloud providers, cloud data warehouses, marketing clouds, and global systems integrators.

•Continue to Innovate and Extend Leadership Position in Identity. We intend to establish LiveRamp as the standard for consumer-level recognition across the marketing ecosystem, providing a single source of user identity for audience measurement and personalization.

•Establish LiveRamp as the Trusted, Best and Essential Industry Standard for Data Collaboration. We intend to continue to make substantial investments in our platform and solutions and extend our market leadership through innovation. Our investments will focus on automation, speed, higher match rates, expanded partner integrations and use cases, and new product development.

•Expand Global Footprint. Many of our customers and partners serve their customers on a global basis, and we intend to expand our presence outside of the United States to serve the needs of our customers in additional geographies. As we expand relationships with our existing customers, we are investing in select regions in Europe and APAC.

•Expand Addressable Market. Historically, our focus has been to enable data-driven advertising for paid media. As customers look to deploy data across additional use cases, we intend to power all customer experience use cases and expand our role inside the enterprise. Call centers, email and messaging campaigns, and supply chain management are examples of this strategy. In addition, over time, we intend to pursue adjacent markets beyond marketing, like risk and fraud, healthcare and government, where similar identity and data connectivity challenges exist.

•Build an Exceptional Business. We do not aspire to be mediocre, good, or even great – we intend to be the absolute best in everything we do. We attract and employ exceptional people, challenge them to accomplish exceptional things, and achieve exceptional results for our customers and shareholders. We do this through six guiding principles: 1) Above all, we do what is right; 2) We love our customers; 3) We say what we mean and do what we say; 4) We empower people; 5) We respect people and time; and 6) We get stuff done.

Privacy Considerations

The growing online advertising and e-commerce industries are converging, with consumers expecting a seamless experience across all channels, in real time. This challenges marketing organizations to balance the deluge of data and demands of the consumer with responsible methods of managing data internally and with advertising technology intermediaries.

We have policies and operational practices governing our use of data that are designed to actively promote a set of meaningful privacy guidelines for digital advertising and direct marketing via all channels of addressable media, e-commerce, risk management and information industries as a whole. Since the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union ("EU") in July 2020, as part of our effort to ensure our continued ability to process information across borders we continue to adhere to the principles of the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield networks, although we do not rely on those frameworks as a legal basis for transfers of personal data. We have dedicated teams in place to oversee our compliance with the data protection regulations that govern our business activities in the various countries in which we operate.

The U.S. Congress and state legislatures, along with federal regulatory authorities, have recently increased their attention on matters concerning the collection and use of consumer data. Data privacy legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress, and at least sixteen states now have passed comprehensive privacy legislation. Additional state legislatures have proposed, and in certain cases enacted, a variety of types of data privacy legislation. In all of the non-U.S. locations in which we do business, laws and regulations governing the collection and use of personal data either exist or are being developed.

We expect the trend of enacting and revising data protection laws to continue and that new and expanded data privacy legislation in various forms will be implemented in the U.S. and in other countries around the globe. We are supportive of legislation that codifies current industry guidelines of accountability-based data governance that includes meaningful transparency for the individual, appropriate controls over personal information and choice of whether that information is shared with independent third parties for marketing purposes. We also support legislation requiring all custodians of sensitive information to deploy reasonable information security safeguards to protect that information.

Changes in laws and regulations and violations of laws or regulations by us could have a significant direct or indirect effect on our operations and financial condition, as detailed below and set forth under "Risk Factors-Risks Related to Government Regulation and Taxation."

Customers

Our customer base consists primarily of Fortune 1000 companies and organizations in the financial services, insurance, information services, direct marketing, retail, consumer packaged goods, technology, automotive, healthcare, travel and communications industries as well as in non-profit sectors. Given the strong network effects associated with our platform, we work with both enterprise marketers and the companies they partner with to execute their marketing, including agencies, marketing technology providers, publishers and data providers. We had 900 direct subscription customers at the end of fiscal year 2024.

We seek to maintain long-term relationships with our customers. Our customers are loyal and typically grow their use of the platform over time, as evidenced by our growing number of customers whose subscription contracts exceed $1 million in annual revenue, which totaled 115 at the end of fiscal year 2024.

Our ten largest customers represented approximately 27% of our revenues in fiscal year 2024. There were no customers that individually exceeded 10% of the Company's revenue in fiscal year 2024.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales teams focus on new business development across all markets – sales to new customers and sales of new lines of business to existing customers, as well as revenue growth within existing accounts. We organize our customer relationships around customer type and industry vertical, as we believe that understanding and speaking to the nuances of each industry is the most effective way to positively impact our customers’ businesses.

Our partner organization focuses on enabling key media partners, agencies and software providers who can help drive value for our customers. We are actively expanding our channel sales efforts with customer data platforms, public cloud providers, cloud data warehouses, marketing clouds, and global systems integrators.

Our marketing efforts are focused on increasing awareness for our brand, executing thought leadership initiatives, supporting our sales team and generating new leads. We seek to accomplish these objectives by hosting and presenting at industry conferences, hosting customer advisory boards, publishing white papers and research, public relations activities, social media presence and advertising campaigns.

Research and Development

We continue to invest in our global data connectivity platform to enable effective use of data. Our research and development teams are focused on the full cycle of product development from customer discovery through development, testing and release. Research and development expense was $151.2 million in fiscal 2024, compared to $189.2 million in fiscal 2023, and $157.9 million in fiscal 2022. Management expects to maintain research and development spending, as a percentage of revenue, at relatively similar levels to fiscal 2024 in fiscal 2025.

Seasonality

While the majority of our business is not subject to seasonal fluctuations, our Data Marketplace and usage-based subscription revenue experience modest seasonality, as the revenue generated from these areas of the business are more transactional in nature and tied to overall advertising spend by our customers. For example, many advertisers allocate the largest portion of their budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year in order to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. We expect our Data Marketplace and usage-based subscription revenue to continue to fluctuate based on seasonal factors that affect the advertising industry as a whole. Usage-based subscription revenue equaled 15% of total subscription revenue in fiscal 2024, 14% in fiscal 2023 and 15% in fiscal 2022.

Competition

We operate in a complex and competitive environment. Competitors of LiveRamp are typically also members of our partner and reseller ecosystem, creating a paradigm where competition is the norm. Our primary competitors are companies that sell data onboarding as part of a suite of marketing applications or services. Walled gardens that offer a direct interface for matching customer relationship management (CRM) data compete for a portion of our services, particularly amongst marketers that have not yet adopted in-house platforms for programmatic marketing or attribution. Some providers of tag management, data management, and cross-device marketing solutions have adopted positioning similar to our business and compete for mindshare. In markets outside the United States, we primarily face small, local market players.

We continue to focus on levers to increase our competitiveness and believe that investing in the product and technology platform of our business is a key to our continued success. Further, we believe that enabling a broad partner ecosystem will help us to continue to provide competitive differentiation.

Pricing

Approximately 78% of our revenue is derived from subscription-based arrangements sold on an annual or multi-year basis. Our subscription pricing is based on data volume supported by our platform. We also generate revenue from data providers, digital publishers and advanced TV platforms in the form of revenue-sharing agreements in our Data Marketplace.

Our Human Capital

LiveRamp's most valuable resource is our people. Our board of directors considers LiveRamp's talent strategy and Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging commitment and programs to be a critical component of our Company strategy and a competitive advantage. We believe each hire is an opportunity to diversify our workforce and add new skills and capabilities that will foster greater innovation.

LiveRamp employs approximately 1,400 employees ("LiveRampers") worldwide. No U.S. LiveRampers are represented by a labor union or subject to a collective bargaining agreement. To the best of management’s knowledge, no LiveRamper is an elected member of works councils and trade unions representing LiveRamp employees in the European Union. LiveRamp has never experienced a work stoppage. We promote high employee engagement, open communication and a culture of equality to foster positive employee relations.

Attracting and Retaining Talent

We attract and retain employees with market-competitive, internally equitable compensation and benefit programs, learning and development opportunities that support career growth and advancement opportunities, and employee engagement initiatives that foster a strong, inclusive company culture.

Through our dedicated organizational development program, we regularly assess our human capital opportunities and needs and focus on building the individual capabilities of our employees to facilitate achieving the overall goals of our organization. We aggregate and analyze critical human capital metrics, including employee retention and engagement, to monitor the success of our strategy and make adjustments accordingly. Our employee engagement score is above industry benchmark.

Since 2016, LiveRamp has either qualified for or been certified as a Best Place to Work. Additionally, LiveRamp has been listed among the 100 Best Companies to Work by Fortune every year since 2018. Recently, LiveRamp was recognized as a Great Place to Work and a Company that Cares by People Magazine in 2022. We strive to not just earn these accolades, but also to push the boundaries of what we know we are capable of as guardians of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging (“DIB”) efforts are a cornerstone of LiveRamp’s innovative culture. In 2020, we hired our first-ever Head of Diversity Strategy and published LiveRamp’s Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Charter, which set our commitment to and the core pillars of DIB for LiveRamp, explained our current programs and practices as well as showed the breadth of leaders making DIB part of their focus. Our CEO also joined 1,000 CEOs of the world’s leading companies and organizations to sign the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ pledge, the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

We believe there are three core pillars of DIB: Workforce, Product & Customers, and Community. These pillars reflect the intricate relationship of diversity, inclusion and belonging—both internally and externally. To be effective, we believe all three must work together harmoniously for an environment that is equal parts diverse, encouraging, and accepting. Creating a welcoming and inclusive workplace where colleagues feel a sense of belonging creates more innovation and produces better outcomes for our employees, our business and our communities. We work to foster a sense of belonging where everyone can bring their full selves to work.

Investing in our people is foundational to building an exceptional culture where everyone can thrive. We seek out brilliant people from all backgrounds. One way we further this is that we provide candidates with a significant amount of information about who we are and how our products work to help level the knowledge base among referrals and direct applicants. Additionally, candidates have the opportunity to speak directly with members of our business employee resource groups (“BERGs”) to get a first-hand perspective of what it is like to work here.

Forming teams with diverse backgrounds enables us to achieve our goal of building products that can be used by customers with varying capabilities, which reduces inequities and serves a wider variety of business needs. Our BERGs exist to support the growth and development of our employees, communities and business to increase diversity, inclusion and belonging. Currently, we have six BERGs: EQUAL@LiveRamp, Women@LiveRamp, Badge@LiveRamp, SOMOS@LiveRamp, SAUCE@LiveRamp, and MOSAIC@LiveRamp.

Diversity, inclusion and belonging also lives outside of our office walls. We have invested in LiveRamp.org, which includes opportunities for volunteerism, philanthropic initiatives, employee donation matching and our Data for Good initiative, which enables organizations to use data to solve some of society’s biggest challenges.

Information about our Executive Officers

LiveRamp’s executive officers, their current positions, ages and business experience are listed below. They are elected by the board of directors annually or as necessary to fill vacancies or to fill new positions. There are no family relationships among any of the officers or directors of the Company.

Scott E. Howe, age 56, is the Chief Executive Officer of the Company. Prior to joining the Company in 2011, he served as corporate vice president of Microsoft Advertising Business Group from 2007–2010. In this role, he managed a multi-billion-dollar business encompassing all emerging businesses related to online advertising, including search, display, ad networks, in-game, mobile, digital cable and a variety of enterprise software applications. Mr. Howe was employed from 1999–2007 as an executive and later as a corporate officer at aQuantive, Inc. where he managed three lines of business, including Avenue A | Razorfish (a leading Seattle-based global consultancy in digital marketing and technology), DRIVE Performance Media (now Microsoft Media Network), and Atlas International (an adserving technology now owned by Facebook). Earlier in his career, he was with The Boston Consulting Group and Kidder, Peabody & Company, Inc. He is a member of the board of directors of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and previously served on the board of Blue Nile, Inc., a leading online retailer of diamonds and fine jewelry. Mr. Howe is amagna cum laude graduate of Princeton University, where he earned a degree in economics, and he holds an MBA from Harvard University.

Lauren R. Dillard, age 38, is the Company’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, a position she has held since April 2023. She previously served as the Company’s SVP of Finance and Investor Relations, overseeing all aspects of the Company’s finance and investor relations functions since assuming the role in August 2021. Prior to her current positions, she served as the Company’s Chief Communications Officer & Head of Investor Relations from 2018 to 2021. Prior to joining the Company, she worked in corporate finance and investor relations for a number of San Francisco Bay Area technology companies and started her career at Ernst & Young. She is an active community leader and has served on and chaired several Bay Area nonprofit boards, including the Bay Area Discovery Museum and Multiplying Good. Ms. Dillard is a certified public accountant (inactive) and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Santa Clara University.

Jerry C. Jones, age 68, is the Company’s Executive Vice President, Chief Ethics and Legal Officer, and Secretary. He joined the Company in 1999 and currently oversees the Company’s legal, data ethics and government relations matters. He also assists in the strategy and execution of mergers and alliances and the Company’s strategic initiatives. Prior to joining the Company, Mr. Jones was employed for 19 years as an attorney with the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, representing a broad range of business interests. Mr. Jones is a member of the board of directors of Agilysys, Inc. (NASDAQ: AGYS), a leading developer and marketer of proprietary enterprise software, services and solutions to the hospitality and retail industries, where he serves on the Compensation Committee and the Nominating & Governance Committee. He is a member of the U.S. Chaber of Commerce Board of Directors. He is a Special Advisor to the Club de Madrid, an organization composed of over 100 former Presidents and Prime Ministers from more than 70 democratic countries. Previously, he served as the Chair of FASTER Arkansas, the board of directors of ForwARd Arkansas, the board of directors of the CDIA and was a co-founder of uhireUS. Mr. Jones was also previously a member of the board of directors of Heifer International and Entrust, Inc. until it was purchased by private investors in 2009. He is the former chairman of the board of the Arkansas Virtual Academy, a statewide virtual public school, and is a former member of the UA Little Rock Board of Visitors. Mr. Jones holds a bachelor’s degree in public administration and a juris doctorate degree, both from the University of Arkansas.

Mohsin Hussain, age 51, has served as the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering of the Company since 2021. During the year prior to assuming this position, he was the Company’s Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering. Mr. Hussain has more than 25 years’ experience in engineering leadership and product innovation in the areas of software-as-a-service, data science, machine learning, analytics, and the cloud. Before joining LiveRamp, Mr. Hussain was employed for two years as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Criteo (NYSE: CRTO) where he led a large-scale buildout of the U.S. engineering team, new product launches, and the R&D integration of several acquisitions, including Criteo's largest, Hooklogic (integrated and rebranded as Criteo's Retail Media Platform). Prior to that, he was Vice President of Engineering at Criteo for over two years. Earlier in his career Mr. Hussain held leadership roles in several high-growth start-ups and public companies, including AOL/Netscape (now Yahoo), Siebel Systems (now Oracle), and SunPower. He has been a member of the Google Cloud CIO/CTO Customer Advisory Board since 2021. Mr. Hussain is named as an inventor on 18 issued patents and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from University of California at Berkeley.

Vihan Sharma, age 45, has served as the Chief Revenue Officer of the Company since December 2023 where he is in charge of overseeing global sales, customer operations and partnership teams. He joined the Company in 2009 and currently oversees all global commercial functions and is responsible for LiveRamp's growth and operations in Europe. Prior to his current position, Mr. Sharma served as the Company’s Executive Vice President of Global Sales and was Managing Director Europe from 2019 to 2023. Mr. Sharma has extensive experience in global data and product strategy and has also served as Vice President of Safe Haven and Managing Director France, a leadership position he held for almost six years. Prior to joining the Company, Mr. Sharma held several strategic leadership positions across a number of startups in Europe. Mr. Sharma holds a master's degree in business administration from the ESCP Business School.

Kimberly Bloomston, age 41, has served as the Chief Product Officer of the Company since December 2023. For almost two years prior to assuming her current position, Ms. Bloomston served as the Company’s Senior Vice President of Product and prior to that served in the role of Vice President of Product, Core Platform & Data Marketplace. Ms. Bloomston has over 15 years of experience leading product management and business operations and has served in executive leadership roles overseeing product, design and operations teams across a variety of software companies and industries. Prior to joining the Company, in 2020, she served as the Vice President of Product Management at Ellucian, a cloud and SaaS solutions provider in the higher education space, for over three years. Ms. Bloomston has also led sales and partner programs, including experience leading strategic initiatives that focus on maturing and expanding solutions in the midst of market and company transformation. Ms. Bloomston holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Baruch College.