WPP bets on InfoSum to become ‘huge accelerator’
Last week, WPP acquired InfoSum in what the holding group billed as a “major investment” in its AI-driven data offer.
What made the data collaboration platform an enticing acquisition target?
“The reason we made the decision to acquire it is it’s very consistent with what we’re seeing in terms of demand from clients and also for our strategy for data and technology,” Alex Steer, global chief data officer at WPP’s data and technology subsidiary Choreograph, told The Media Leader.
Steer noted that InfoSum was “founded on the principle of maximising data collaboration while minimising data movement”.
InfoSum launched in 2016 with the aim of providing a secure data clean room and to enable clients to connect consumer data without the need to share it.
From 2020 to 2024, its CEO and chairman was Brian Lesser, who subsequently became GroupM’s global CEO last summer.
But, according to Steer, InfoSum would have been a top acquisition target regardless of Lesser’s connection.
“It gives us a huge accelerator of what we want to be able to do,” he explained.
In a statement, Lesser celebrated the acquisition as allowing WPP to “create even more value from [clients’] first-party data and enable us to train client AI models against the most data, from the most places, at unprecedented scale and speed”.
He continued: “As more and more clients leverage our AI-first solutions, every client model, every audience and every campaign will benefit from network effects that will exponentially increase their intelligence and competitive advantage.”
ID to AI
Steer noted that InfoSum’s most well-known products have been their data clean room solutions, which he argued go “almost the opposite of the direction of travel that large parts of the industry have taken towards data centralisation — trying to create big central ID databases”.
Whereas WPP’s competitors have “doubled down” on the idea of owning a centralised database of consumer identifiers (such as email addresses or phone numbers) “in order to act as the kind of bridging point between advertisers and, for example, platforms or retailers who want to collaborate with their data”, the InfoSum approach has “always been the inverse of that”, according to Steer.
“Data should stay where it is,” he said.
The acquisition is at the heart of what WPP leadership has referred to as its “from ID to AI” data strategy, which intends to use AI to find patterns, links and opportunities between datasets that sit in different places.
“Our point of view is that you need to be not single-modal but multi-modal,” Steer explained. “InfoSum is a scaled, very capable, forward-looking technology company that accelerates our ability to do that — to allow more data collaboration around more types of data while minimising data movement.”
Steer admitted that InfoSum’s business has historically focused primarily on one-to-one ID matching, as opposed to delivering modelling capability directly useful for an AI strategy.
“It’s a fair point that where [InfoSum] came from was this idea that when you have data about people, how do you collaborate while keeping it safe? That’s still going to be an important part of the principle,” he said, adding that “having that capability as part of the solutions that we develop at WPP is going to be really important”.
“We haven’t gone and bought another ID solution, another data aggregator, another data broker,” Steer continued. “We found a technology that, even where you are doing one-to-one matching, enables you to do it in a federated and distributed way.
“It will be one of the components that allows us to continue having these more sort of scaled and grown-up data collaborations with the big platforms, the big retailers and with the big brands, because we have the technology that allows us to say ‘OK, we can make decisions based on the whole of the data that all of you have got that you bring to the party in collaboration’, but without having to move or copy or create a centralised repository of that data.”
Fitting into WPP Open
One former GroupM agency employee told The Media Leader they were sceptical of the InfoSum acquisition, however.
“The GroupM crowd have always fantasised of having a data ‘spine’, but at most what they’ve bought with InfoSum is some expensive cloud storage, some client relationships that would be hard to activate and some technology that is being commodified by the hyper-scalers,” they argued. “A logo for another doomed pitch deck, in other words.”
Citing InfoSum’s lack of modelling capability, as well as the relative disappointment of GroupM’s former data and tech division MPlatform, the former employee added that they believe InfoSum will most likely “get stuck in some kind of tech integration hell for a couple years, they’ll trot it out in pitches and then it’ll be quietly shelved”.
But Steer takes a different view both of InfoSum and the value of MPlatform. He called MPlatform a “successful and effective bit of our business for many years”, adding that many of the tech brands under MPlatform have been centralised under Choreograph.
“For each MPlatform that you could name, I can promise you there are many more,” he said. “We have brought something in the region of 100 different teams, technologies, solutions, datasets over the last two or three years into Choreograph. And a big part of what we’re doing is asking: ‘What does future fit look like?'”
For WPP, being future fit is wrapped up in the success of WPP Open, WPP’s AI-driven marketing operating system. According to Steer, InfoSum will also help improve the “speed and connectivity” of WPP Open as it pulls in different datasets, including partner data and data from clients.
“It gives us a scaled technology that we can use to make that connectivity of data faster and more effective,” he continued. “The pay-off to that is that the teams that work on our clients businesses have got more data, richer data, better-joined-up data available in their tools that they use to work.
“The other pay-off is that we are doing that in a way that is not putting that data at risk.”
Future acquisition targets
Nothing that WPP is just in the “early stages” of integrating InfoSum, Steer outlined that success for the acquisition will be measured in two core ways: the continued success of InfoSum as an independently operating part of WPP’s broader business and the degree to which it has a positive impact on the data and technology capability within Open.
“All holding companies get very clear feedback and very clear asks on their data and technology proposition in every new-business pitch and in every major client discussion,” said Steer. “That’s the other thing that I’ll be measuring the success of this on: to what extent is the capabilities that InfoSum bring further advancing our WPP Open story — and particularly our data story within the Open platform.”
While Steer declined to give specifics, he did suggest WPP would consider further acquisition targets for its data offering.
“This is an active area of high investment for us. It’s strategically important for us, for our clients, and we know you don’t always get the best results fastest by building everything yourself.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we looked at or made similar acquisitions in the future.”