• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

WPP Group and media are making big changes through AI and data privacy. InfoSum will help it get there inside the agency's newly rebranded WPP Media division.

InfoSum -- which WPP acquired in April -- has been pushing to build on its infrastructure and partnerships.

Integrated into the media investment group WPP Media, formerly GroupM, InfoSum will help the agency create marketing solutions driven by AI.

It began Wednesday with a B2B campaign targeting businesses and senior marketers. The campaign highlights WPP’s AI knowledge and advanced capabilities of WPP Open. 

Francis Dy, head of innovation at Wavemaker Philippines, in a LinkedIn post called the acquisition a “significant power shift in the industry, adding that it comes "with the rise of privacy regulation, the death of third-party cookies, and the increasing complexity of data interoperability across platforms” as agencies and holding groups scramble to build the next-generation infrastructure for identity, personalization, and performance.

“Publicis did it with Epsilon,” he wrote. “IPG has Acxiom. But what WPP has now — through InfoSum — might just change the game altogether."

Most partnerships today involve data being moved, copied, or stored centrally, which Dy explains introduces latency, privacy risks and complexity.

"What made InfoSum stand out was itsradically different approach:no data movement at all," he wrote. This is similar to how Google and Apple are thinking about the use of data through AI, keep it on the consumer's device.

One of the major announcements, made earlier this month, is a set of integrations with Amazon Ads.

Through the Amazon partnership, advertisers can push signals directly to Amazon DSP (ADSP) or Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) by leveraging InfoSum’s decentralized architecture through the Push-to-Amazon function. This provides advanced look-alike modeling, retargeting, and audience suppression.

WPP’s acquisition reunited InfoSum with its former CEO Brian Lesser.

InfoSum, now a data collaboration platform, has had many iterations in the last several years, rebranding in 2017 from CognitiveLogic.

Nick Halstead founded the company in 2015 under the name CognitiveLogic. The first product, Link, has been designed to provide businesses with quick insights from Big Data silos.

The company secured several funding rounds from investors such as Mark Cuban and Sir Martin Sorrell, including a $65 million Series B round in August 2021. InfoSum had raised $93.2 million in eight funding rounds.

The Discovery platform, launched in 2019, allowed media owners to make their audiences available for insights as ad targeting in browsers went cookieless. In 2024, Private Path focused on privacy-first measurement.

WPP integrated InfoSum into the media investment group GroupM to help it create marketing solutions driven by AI.

WPP Media, as GroupM, and Amazon Ads also launched a shoppable content partnership involving the Amazon Live free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) Channel.