WPP Media fires its first salvo in war for AI domination

Just days after the agency’s official launch, WPP Media has unveiled a proprietary data-driven AI solution which it claims is the industry’s first Large Marketing Model and next generation tool, “built to drive real business outcomes and fuel faster, smarter marketing performance for clients”.

Dubbed Open Intelligence, the agency maintains the system is a “fundamentally different approach to using AI to drive business growth, trained on the world’s largest and most diverse set of audience, behavioural, and event data across WPP’s decentralised partnership network”.

Spearheaded by its recent acquisition of InfoSum, the model also taps into data from partners including Google, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Microsoft Advertising, Adstra, Experian and Lumen Research. It learns from trillions of signals across over 75 markets to help brands reach up to 5 billion adults globally, with “relevance, speed, and precision”. There are more than 350 partners in total.

WPP Media maintains Open Intelligence represents a new category of intelligence: one applied specifically to marketing and trained on commercial, geographic, cultural, and behavioural data.

It 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.

From this, WPP Media reckons it can build bespoke models for its 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.

The network of partnerships apparently also enables the agency to activate and optimise these models in-platform and across channels without signal loss, ensuring data is never moved or dependent on any one ID.

The company stated: “We want to empower marketers to access many more types of data, at much greater scale, to transform media experiences for consumers and maximise marketing effectiveness. Our approach isn’t to reject identity data, but to outperform it by combing identity with the vast array of data sources that do not conform to traditional identity standards.

“Rather than collating more identity data, Open Intelligence eliminates the problem entirely. By enabling marketers to collaborate across the most meaningful data for their needs we unlock an entirely new marketing paradigm: Intelligence Beyond Identity.

“Intelligence Beyond Identity is a multimodal approach to data-driven marketing that uses identity data to ensure we understand who we are reaching with our campaigns but goes much further.

“By training AI models against multiple dimensions of data, we find we are able to understand and predict audience behaviour more accurately, without jeopardising consumer privacy or information security. This approach enables marketers to maximise the value of their existing customer data and extend it further, discovering and connecting with new audiences and creating competitive business advantages based on unique insights into consumer behaviour.”