Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz is advising France’s Publicis Groupe on its $2.2bn acquisition of US data collaboration company LiveRamp, which is being repped by Sullivan & Cromwell (S&C).
Reuters reported that the all-cash deal continues a strategy Publicis has pursued to strengthen its data capabilities in order to target consumers more precisely.
The Wachtell team advising Publicis is led by New York partner and corporate practice co-chair Adam Emmerich, who advised the group in its $3.7bn buy of digital consulting and marketing firm Sapient in 2015 and in 2019 when it bought Alliance Data’s Epsilon business for $4.4bn.
He also acted for Publicis on its aborted $35bn merger with Omnicon back in 2014, which was set to form the world’s largest advertising group before it collapsed amid a power struggle and complex tax and regulatory hurdles.
Meanwhile the S&C team is being fielded by Palo Alto-based M&A partners Mike Ringler and Peter Jones, who earlier this year led the S&C team that advised xAI in its blockbuster $250bn sale to SpaceX, the largest private company merger in history.
Publicis said the acquisition of LiveRamp, which identifies and matches datasets without directly exposing personally identifiable information, would make it a leader in data co-creation.
The group’s focus on building its access to data began with the Epsilon acquisition and has seen it overtake rivals, including Omnicon, to become the world’s most valuable advertising group by market capitalisation.
Publicis will pay $38.50 per share for LiveRamp, a 29.8% premium to the company’s Friday closing price, the last trading day before the announcement.
The deal has been signed and is expected to close before year-end 2026, subject to regulatory and LiveRamp shareholders’ approval.
In Sunday’s statement, the group also raised its 2027 and 2028 constant currency growth targets to 7%-8% for net revenue and 8%-10% for headline earnings per share, up from previous targets of 6%-7% and 7%-9%, respectively.
BofA Securities is serving as financial advisor to Publicis, and Evercore is serving as financial advisor to LiveRamp.
The Wachtell team also includes corporate partner Hannah Clark, alongside partners Illene Knable Gotts (antitrust), Michael Schobel (executive compensation and benefits), Michael Benn (finance), Deborah Paul (tax) and David Anders (litigation).
S&C and Wachtell’s work on mega deals powered them to the top of the London Stock Exchange Group’s M&A rankings for the first quarter by deal value, with S&C advising on deals worth $177.7bn and Wachtell placing second with $149.6bn of deals.
Worldwide M&A activity clocked in at just over $1trn during that time, up 35% from the same period in 2024 and the strongest start to a year since record-breaking 2021.
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