Apple’s Safari block hands WPP a fresh case for InfoSum

“What I will say is it doesn’t really impact our data solution at all because we don’t rely solely on identity matching,” Rose said on the call. 

Apple declared open season on that kind of matching earlier this month, when it finally explained why it had started blocking some of the companies that do it in its Safari browser. The industry calls it identity resolution and it grew up as a fix for the cookie’s slow death. Publishers and advertisers who lost the ability to recognize people with those cookies turned to the one thing many of their visitors hand over willingly: an email address, typed to log-in, subscribe or check out. The sites then partner with specialist firms such as LiveRamp, ID5 or The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, adding a small piece of their code to their page. When someone signs in, that code scrambles the email into a string of characters and sends it to the firm, which returns an ID. Because the same address provides the same ID on every site using the service, advertisers can recognize the same person on a news site, a retailer and recipe blog without a cookie. The firms’ pitch is plumbing for publisher’s first-party data and the sites using it typically disclose it in their privacy policies.

Apple sees it rather differently. In an Oct. 19 blog post titled “Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure,” the engineers behind Safari argued that the plumbing pitch misses the point. Each site may only be sharing its own customers’ details but the firm in the middle sees the same email arrive from all of them, which lets it connect a person’s activity across sites in a way no single site could. Apple also took issue with the idea that people agree to this, arguing that nobody signing up for a newsletter expects their address to end up with a third party or something else entirely. 

Apple is hardly alone in that view. Since the General Data Protection Regulation arrived in 2018, regulators and platforms have been pulling the industry away from tracking individuals across the web, sometimes forcefully, often haltingly. Rose’s pitch is that WPP saw where that was headed.

“We bought InfoSum roughly two years ago. We’ve now fully integrated it into our WPP Open platform. It is a data collaboration platform that relies on a mix of data sources from consumer identity to our own WPP proprietary data to live signals from our ecosystem of data partners, nearly 400 of them,” said Rose. “We use all of this data to identify untapped growth audiences and predict consumer behavior and ultimately deliver growth outcomes for our clients. Therefore, I would say in the scheme of things, the impact on WPP to these iOS changes are minimal.”

Read that way, Rose was doing more than playing down a risk. She was making the case, again, for InfoSum.

It’s a case WPP has had to keep making. Plenty in the industry questioned the April 2025 deal and the doubts grew louder when Publicis agreed to pay $2.2 billion for LiveRamp this May. Publicis appeared to have bought the industry’s data switchboard. WPP appeared to have bought a niche. Five months on, LiveRamp is on Apple’s blocklist. WPP had already stopped using it by June.

The difference is where the matching happens. Apple’s block works in the browser, cutting Safari off from firms whose code collects email on a publisher’s page. InfoSum operates away from the browser. Each party’s data stays in its own sealed-off environment and in WPP’s newer setup inside the client or publisher’s own systems, with only the insights shared between them. That puts it outside the reach of what Safari is currently blocking. 

“The subtext of course is that their deadly rival, Publicis, is dancing to a different tune,” said Charles Ping, managing director at M&A advisors Winterberry Group. “If Cindy can make the $2billion+ that Publicis spent on Liveramp (plus Lotame and Epsilon before that) by contrast look poor both strategically and financially on an earnings call then that’s a strategic investor message nailed.  And none of Publicis’ acquisitions have delivered European capability.”

None of this puts InfoSum entirely clear of Apple’s argument, of course. Consumer identity is still one of its inputs, as Rose noted, and connecting what different companies know about the same people is close to what Apple objected to. It just happens to with data the parties already hold, somewhere Apple’s browser doesn’t reach. 

“In reality, this does not mean WPP is unscathed,” said Robert Webster, founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU and former WPP exec. “It also need signals to deliver on safari and those signals have been degraded from them as from everyone else. Many of the ad tech systems WPP uses are equally encumbered, if not more so by Apple’s policies — moreso because without the email match grids they are not able to bring tougher sufficiency login data to make up for Publicis’ well known advantage in match rate across email graphs.”

Big picture

The comments came as WPP turnaround plan looks to be gathering momentum. Over the last quarter, its media arm’s revenue, the biggest for the holdco, returned to growth. WPP Media’s revenue excluding costs passed on to clients grew 0.3% on a like-for-like basis in the third quarter reversing a 2.8 decline in the previous quarter.

Getting there meant some tough calls along the way, none more closely watched than WPP’s decision to sit out the pitch for Coca-Cola’s North American media account while it fought to keep the roughly $2 billion Coke spends on media, data and tech everywhere else. On the call, Rose reasoned that pitching costs a lot of money and a lot of time, with no guarantee of a win at the end. That math would have carried extra weight for Rose because WPP had already lost the account to Publicis last year. Going back so soon after would have meant spending heavily to win back business Coke had chosen to move barely 18 months earlier.

“We didn’t participate in the North America pitch,” said Rose. “Mostly because we won the rest of the world, and we have a huge amount of work to do in a very short period of time. I had people, many, many, many people pitching for many, many, many weeks over the summer. I was with them myself in London and Shanghai and Mexico City.”

That said, it was not a decision that was easy.

“We made a tough call between spending yet another six weeks pitching for North America versus delivering against what we had already won,” said Rose. “It was a fine judgment call, which I made, and it is as simple as that, really. That is your question on Coca-Cola North America.”