Apple’s crackdown on browser-based identity resolution has given WPP a timely moment to re-litigate its InfoSum acquisition. On the holding company’s third-quarter earnings call, CEO Cindy Rose told analysts the Safari block has minimal impact.
What Apple has blocked
Identity resolution grew up as the ad industry’s fix for the fading third-party cookie. A person who logs in to a news site, retailer or recipe blog hands over an email address. Publishers partner with firms such as LiveRamp, ID5 or The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, whose page code hashes that email into a persistent ID. The same address produces the same ID across sites, so advertisers can recognise one person without a cookie.
Apple’s Oct. 19 post, titled “Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure,” argues that the middle firm sees the same email from many sites and can connect activity no single site could. Apple also questions whether users truly expect their address to end up with a third party.
WPP’s defence: collaboration, not matching
“It doesn’t really impact our data solution at all because we don’t rely solely on identity matching,” Rose said.
Rose said WPP bought InfoSum roughly two years ago and has fully integrated it into WPP Open. The platform combines consumer identity, WPP proprietary data and live signals from nearly 400 data partners. The goal is to identify untapped growth audiences, predict consumer behaviour and deliver growth outcomes.
InfoSum operates away from the browser. Each party’s data stays in its own sealed environment, and in WPP’s newer setup inside client or publisher systems only insights are shared. That keeps it outside the page-level block Safari currently enforces.
The Publicis contrast
The competitive subtext is hard to miss. Publicis agreed to pay $2.2 billion for LiveRamp in May, while WPP’s InfoSum deal drew doubts. LiveRamp is now on Apple’s blocklist, and WPP had already stopped using it by June.
Charles Ping, managing director at M&A advisors Winterberry Group, called the earnings-call framing “a strategic investor message nailed.” Ping argued it makes Publicis’s spending look poor strategically and financially, adding that none of Publicis’s acquisitions have delivered European capability.
Former WPP executive Robert Webster offered a caution. Safari’s signal cuts have degraded everyone, and WPP still needs those signals. He said losing email match grids compounds Publicis’s known advantage in match rate across email graphs.
What marketers should do
- Map every vendor that hashes emails in the browser and ask what happens if Safari blocks it.
- Test data collaboration platforms that keep raw data out of the browser and share only insights.
- Diversify identity providers so no single blocklist decision halts measurement.
The comments arrived as WPP’s media arm returned to growth. WPP Media’s revenue excluding pass-through costs grew 0.3% like-for-like in the third quarter, reversing a 2.8% decline in the previous quarter. Rose also defended skipping Coca-Cola’s North America media pitch while delivering on roughly $2 billion in retained Coke business elsewhere.
Source: Digiday
