UK-based agency holding group WPP’s media arm WPP Media this afternoon unveiled ‘Open Intelligence’, which it describes as a “next-gen data solution and the industry’s first Large Marketing Model”. The news comes less than a week after WPP Media rebranded from GroupM, a move which itself was designed to convey the media group’s AI focus (as well as a more unified internal structure), and provides fresh details of WPP’s new AI-centred media offering.
Since returning to WPP as CEO of WPP Media last year, Brian Lesser has been outlining his vision for the future of media, one which charts a different strategic course from some of WPP’s competitors. Publicis has attributed a lot of its recent success to Epsilon, the data and identity business it acquired back in 2019. Epsilon, alongside Publicis’ more recent acquisition Lotame, have given the French group unique access to a massive database of user data, all pinned to individual IDs.
Rather than looking to buy a similar asset, Lesser and others at WPP Media have spoken of the need to create AI models which can draw insights from across a wide range of data sources, including those which aren’t resolved back to an individual ID about a specific person. Alex Steer, global chief data officer at WPP’s data business Choreograph, earlier this year described to VideoWeek how AI can be very effective when it comes to finding relationships and “translating” between different data points, in the same manner that AI chatbots can take a text input and “translate” it into an image output.
That technology — an AI model built specifically to draw insights from across disparate data sources — is what WPP Media says it has built with Open Intelligence.
“Just as Large Language Models (LLMs) generate intelligence and content from human language and imagery, our Large Marketing Model (LMM) has been trained to understand and predict audience behaviour and marketing performance based on patterns derived from real-time data about how people engage with content, brands, platforms, and products,” said WPP Media in a statement. “From this foundational intelligence, we can build bespoke models for our clients, each enhanced with their first-party data and fine-tuned according to their individual strategic business goals. Clients use these models to continuously optimise audience segmentation, creative development, and media activation to maximise ROI and real-world results.”
WPP says Open Intelligence will roll out to clients in a phased approach over the course of 2025.
Data partners announced
Today’s news therefore isn’t a surprise — it’s been clear for months that this is what the group has been working towards. WPP’s recent acquisition of data clean room provider InfoSum was part of this vision, giving it an owned and operated means of connecting up data sources in a privacy-safe manner. But the announcement has provided a few fresh details about the technology.
For a start, WPP Media has released a graphic outlining how this Large Marketing Model will operate. There’s a clear separation between the foundational Open Intelligence model, and clients’ own models which will be trained on their own data. This is key to avoiding client concerns about competitors benefiting in some way from their own campaign performance data.
WPP Media has also announced some of the companies partnering with Open Intelligence. FreeWheel, Google, and Microsoft Advertising are listed as ‘technology partners’; Adelaide, Adstra, Circana, Experian, and Lumen Research are signed up as ‘data and measurement partners’; and Snap and TikTok are named as ‘digital platform partners’.
These partners will (in some cases at least) provide data which will inform either Open Intelligence’s foundational model, or clients’ own models. Some of these partners (presumably the technology partners) meanwhile will provide “cloud, compute, and platform infrastructure to support real-time model orchestration and global-scale delivery”.
WPP said that these integrations are “part of an ongoing rollout” as it onboards new partners and extends Open Intelligence across formats and regions.
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