April 3rd-April 8th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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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Top Stories 👁️

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.

Other Notable Headlines

How tariffs will impact different ad channels🔒 - Which parts of the digital advertising industry WON'T be affected by Trump's tariffs? Not many (if any). The IAB says 60% of advertisers plan to cut their ad budgets by 6%-10% because of the tariffs. Overall ad spend forecasts are being trimmed across the board🔒, with eMarketer lowering its 2025 estimate to 6.3% growth (down from 7.5% in November) and Madison & Wall lowering its forecast to 3.6% growth (down from 4.5%). Social media companies will get hit particularly hard, with 41% of US advertisers planning to slash their social media spend. Lower ad spend will hurt media companies, of course, but any company that depends on advertising will feel pain. Meta lost 9%🔒of its market capitalization on Thursday alone, and AppLovin's stock lost 20% between Wednesday and Monday.

Trump punts on TikTok deal — app gets another 75 days - Trump was reportedly close to a TikTok deal that was torpedoed by his own tariffs, forcing him to give TikTok another 75 days to smooth over the arrangement. As part of the deal, American investors would own and operate a new, US-based company that would house TikTok’s US operations, but ByteDance would hold a minority stake. Trump was teed up to sign an executive order approving the agreement and starting a 120-day closing period, but parent company ByteDance said Beijing would no longer approve the deal until after larger trade negotiations about tariffs. It’s unclear who the American investors would be, but Oracle, Amazon, Blackstone, AppLovin, and others have made bids🔒 to buy TikTok. The Chinese government must approve any deal. US lawmakers worry that Beijing could manipulate TikTok’s algorithm or access the data of its 170M US users. (In separate news, the EU may fine TikTok $552M for illegally shipping European user data to China.) So, the uncertainty of TikTok's fate continues. Ad spend may continue to decline on the platform, which will help Meta and force TikTok to aggressively go after ad dollars.

Spotify Opens the Programmatic Floodgates with Ad Exchange Launch🔒- Spotify is going after display, video, and performance ad budgets. The audio giant is introducing a programmatic ad exchange to make it easier for brands to create, buy, and measure ads on Spotify. The Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX) will help brands reach its logged-in user base across music and, eventually, podcast inventory. Its partners include The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Magnite, Yahoo DSP, and others; Spotify also supports alternative identifiers and supply frameworks like The Trade Desk's OpenPath and UID2. To better align with the digital advertising industry's common ad stack elements, Spotify will integrate with third-party measurement vendors such as DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. The moves come as Spotify is riding high from its most profitable year in its history, helped by a 114% increase in ad revenue since 2020.

Roblox scales rewarded video ad offering via Google partnership - The format will be immersive, full-screen 30-second ads that Roblox’s 85M daily users can watch to receive in-game benefits. Early testing shows that the formats are resonating, with 80%-90% completion rates. Roblox plans to introduce billboards and other immersive formats to Google Ad Manager, which links to DSPs and SSPs. Additionally, Roblox is leaning into its ads business further with new partnerships with Cint, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Kantar, and Nielsen to help brands measure the performance and brand safety of their Roblox ad campaigns.

A Look Inside Aquila, The ANA’s Still-Cooking, Cross-Media Measurement Platform - Aquila will provide census-level impression data as a rating service for Meta, Google, TikTok, and other walled garden ad platforms. The goal is to give advertisers visibility into the deduplicated reach and frequency of their campaigns across these ecosystems. There are many companies contributing to Aquila. Comscore, for example, is providing linear and digital TV data. Kantar Media created a 5,000-household calibration panel to inform Aquila's ID model, and Accenture developed the solution and will integrate it with top ad platforms. Beta testing will begin later this year, with launch scheduled for early 2026. ANA is pitching the platform to build support for Aquila and entice advertisers into testing and contributing funding to its development. 

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

Advertisers Urge GOP To Support Opt-Out Privacy Law - The ANA is pushing for a nationwide opt-out privacy standard that would override 19 state laws currently on the books.

Europe’s GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within ‘weeks’ - The European Commission plans to scale back GDPR to make European businesses more competitive with companies in the United States, China, and beyond.

Acadia Acquires Crush, Merging Two Retail Media And Marketplace Agencies - Acadia, led by former 360i CEO Jared Belsky, specializes in helping challenger brands and ecommerce-native companies. Crush is unique in that it earns its revenue only when its client measurably grows their businesses.

Nielsen Dominating Upfront Currency, Once Again - Most upfront deals this year will be guaranteed against Nielsen's currency from its Big Data + Panel measurement solution.

Paramount, Experian to Partner in New Ad Data Initiative🔒- To boost targeting, Experian’s Partner Innovation Initiative will provide audience insights and data signals to Paramount's ad unit.

Yotpo Acquires The CDP Coho AI, Solidifying Its Pitch For Retention Over Incrementality - CDP consolidation continues. Yotpo, an Israeli retention-based marketing and analytics company, hopes to make Coho's customer data platform more "actionable."

G/O Media Sells Quartz and The Inventory to Redbrick🔒- Redbrick is a Canadian software firm that hopes to scale up the publishing properties in its portfolio. G/O Media, meanwhile, is liquidating its portfolio, which still includes The Root and Kotaku.

How Publicis Health Media is planning for pharma advertising disruptions - US healthcare and pharma companies spent an estimated $5.15B on linear TV ads in 2024. Those dollars could be threatened if Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. follows through with his calls to ban pharma TV ads.  

Perplexity Integrates firmly.ai Commerce Tech to Scale Seamless Ecommerce Experience - Consumers can now complete their entire shopping journey without leaving Perplexity's platform.

New Study Reveals Nearly 75% of Performance Marketers Are Experiencing Diminishing Returns on Social Media Ad Spend; Over 50% Expand Into Additional Channels Beyond Social - For some performance advertisers, the juice from social media advertising is no longer worth the squeeze, per a report from Taboola. For most, diminishing returns are affecting more than 30% of their spend.

Ogury launches ‘Ogury One’ to tackle privacy first advertising - Ogury's new platform uses "Personified Advertising" to target anonymized personas instead of individuals, functioning without cookies or alternative IDs while reaching 2.5 billion devices monthly across 49 countries.

Comcast rebrands Effectv to Comcast Advertising - Comcast's new Media Solutions team will offer "one point of entry" for all advertising assets across TV, streaming and multiscreen, with Universal Ads and FreeWheel now under the Comcast Advertising umbrella.

Comscore Awarded MRC Accreditation for Household-Level TV Measurement - Comscore has received MRC accreditation for household demographics in national and local TV measurement, maintaining its position as the only measurement service accredited in all 210 local markets using big data.

Walmart Asks Brands to Boost Ad Spend by at Least 25% Despite Sales Stagnation🔒- Some CPGs say advertising through retail media networks—Walmart's in particular—hasn't generated much, if any, sales growth. Perhaps they’re hitting a … wall?

That’s It For This Week 👋

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