InfoSum and WPP’s Choreograph strike an umbrella clean-room data partnership

The move by WPP/GroupM comes a bit later than other holding companies who either have struck deals with InfoSum already or have built out their data platforms using either sibling acquisitions (like IPG/Acxiom or Publicis/Epsilon or Dentsu/Merkle) or from scratch. 

Still, Choreograph CEO Evan Hanlon, who’s been with GroupM since 2011 and has witnessed Choreograph’s prior iterations (M Platform, GroupM Data & Tech), said it’s the larger changes at play within GroupM that are interconnected to each other — of which this partnership is one part — that could help Choreograph reach its full potential. 

“We’re really thinking about the entire organism, not just one thing,” said Hanlon. “Because data technology doesn’t work if you don’t have an operating model that works, if you don’t have teams that make sense on how to operate that, and if you don’t have output from planning and buying work that’s delivering outcomes for our clients. There’s interrelations and interdependencies across the board. We know that we’ve moved accordingly.”

Privacy and the need to collaborate on data in a privacy-safe way will only get more important as agencies straddle that with the need to deliver more precise results for their clients.

“[With] the landscape of unpredictable privacy legislation in the U.S. … our technology in particular is independent, it’s neutral, and frankly, it’s fast and it’s an easier to use product for marketers,” said Lauren Wetzel, who replaced Lesser when he announced his impending move to GroupM. “This ultimately affords GroupM, Choreograph, all the agencies within WPP’s planning and investment teams to create some deeper, richer insights for their clients, ensuring that they have maximum value and ROI for their customers, which obviously at the end of the day for GroupM as a media agency, is critical.”

Although both parties involved cite several advantages to the partnership, Hanlon said there are three particular goals that Choreograph wants to achieve as it builds out its offerings — this partnership marking the latest step: building “the best” end to end media buying and planning platform that’s highly flexible; making it repeatable to bring its collective intelligence gathering to numerous clients; and engendering better connectivity among GroupM’s agencies and their clients. 

“We’ve had a partnership with infoSum for a very long time, because we go to where the demand from our clients is,” said Hanlon. “But as the ecosystem has continued to change — in some cases, consolidation [such as] the Habu acquisition, or reprioritization around other feature functionality —  a really strong, independent, objective partner like infoSum, that sits at the center of so much of our advertiser, publisher, data partner world, was really a no brainer.” 

In a more complex marketing world in which it will only get harder to find the right audiences as privacy regulation becomes more widespread, every holding company needs to shore up its data and privacy-safe offerings, lest they lose clients to others that are better at it.  

“Now’s not the time for marketers to maintain the status quo,” added Wetzel, who noted that InfoSum actively works in more heavily regulated markets than the U.S. “Marketers need to be on the front foot. Collaboration is a foundational element of any media and data strategy. And frankly, those brands need neutral and independent technology to enable that, whether that’s about media planning, creating rich consumer insights, more effective audience profiling and targeting, or whether that’s more effective measurement.”

At least one observer isn’t hugely impressed with the partnership’s elements — or at least the timing of it. “It seems a bit like Choreograph is still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, whereas its competitors are adolescents or adults,” said Stephanie Liu, senior analyst at Forrester who specializes in privacy. “The privacy landscape in the U.S. is a huge headache. I think clean rooms do offer interesting solutions when it comes to measurement, when it comes to insight, but they are not a silver bullet, and they’re not a technology where you can say ‘it’s a clean room, therefore we don’t have to worry about privacy.’”

Liu does credit InfoSum with being a veteran of the business, which is a differentiator. “Where InfoSum actually does have a benefit is that they’re not new to this — they’ve been in the data collaboration space for years. They’re not a little upstart that happened to hit gold. But they are relatively new to the marketing landscape.”

Back to the coincidence: it’s not the first time GroupM has cut a deal or partnership with a company from which it hired a new CEO. After Kirk McDonald was hired in August 2020 to be GroupM’s North American CEO, the following April, the media buying network struck a deal with SSP firm PubMatic — which McDonald had left to join GroupM. Coincidence again? You be the judge.