April 3rd-April 8th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. WPP just bought a company for a large sum.

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WPP ups the data-driven arms race with the purchase of InfoSum🔒
April 3rd, 2025
Source: Digiday

Summary: WPP has acquired data clean room provider InfoSum, a move that was widely anticipated since current GroupM CEO Brian Lesser previously ran the company before joining WPP last July. While terms weren't disclosed, sources place InfoSum's last valuation at around $300 million.

This acquisition is the latest development in the data capabilities arms race among holding companies, following Publicis's recent purchase of Lotame and Omnicom's pending acquisition of IPG (which includes Acxiom).

InfoSum specializes in creating clean room environments where brands' first-party data can safely be cross-referenced with publisher and marketing data. WPP will house InfoSum within GroupM, with InfoSum CEO Lauren Wetzel becoming global chief solutions officer for GroupM. The company will also use InfoSum to train models in WPP Open, the holding company's AI platform.

The acquisition highlights WPP's distinctive data strategy compared to its competitors. While Publicis promotes "use our Epsilon data" and Omnicom/IPG will likely push "use our Acxiom data," WPP is positioning itself as "use your data in our tools" – a more client-data-centric approach.

As Brian Lesser told Digiday: "We think the future is open, not closed. We think the future incorporates all sources of data, not one singular database."

Deal Grades:
InfoSum: A
WPP: B-

Opinion: This acquisition confirms what many of us have suspected: clean rooms are features, not standalone companies. With Habu acquired by LiveRamp, Samooha by Snowflake, and now InfoSum by WPP, the era of independent clean room providers is effectively over.

WPP is positioning this acquisition as a strategic bet on a different data approach than their competitors. While Publicis with Epsilon/Lotame and Omnicom/IPG with Acxiom leverage massive proprietary data assets ("use OUR data"), WPP claims to offer data-agnostic infrastructure ("use YOUR data and OUR tools").

We're skeptical.

The barrier to entry for building first-party data matching technology is relatively low. Any decent engineering team can build clean room capabilities these days (heck, maybe AI can build clean room capabilities). What's actually difficult? Accumulating massive amounts of CRM data and building a robust, deterministic ID graph. That’s what Epsilon and Acxiom already have.

WPP may argue that, because of privacy, their data will wither away. We don’t think so. In fact, recent privacy developments suggest the opposite: Apple getting fined for ATT, Google easing up on fingerprinting, GDPR enforcement being questioned - the privacy landscape may be softening, not hardening.

That said, the timing of this deal makes sense for two reasons:

1. WPP couldn't sit idle while competitors made major data moves with Publicis/Lotame and Omnicom/IPG/Acxiom.

2. Brian Lesser, current GroupM CEO and former InfoSum CEO, likely owns significant equity in InfoSum and just engineered a sweet deal for himself and his former team. 

Which holdco data strategy will win? It depends partly on the client. Brands with limited first-party data may benefit more from Publicis and Omnicom/IPG's ready-to-use data assets, while data-rich clients might prefer WPP's infrastructure approach.

But, even for data-rich advertisers, don't underestimate the value of matching their data to proprietary data that's taken decades to accumulate.

Well played Brian. Well played, sir.

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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