WPP Introduces Open Intelligence

​WPP has launched Open Intelligence - its next-gen data solution and the industry’s first Large Marketing Model - built to drive real business outcomes and fuel faster, smarter marketing performance for the AI era.

At the heart of Open Intelligence 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. The model learns continuously from trillions of signals across more than 350 partners in over 75 markets to help brands reach up to 5 billion adults globally, with relevance, speed, and precision.

How Open Intelligence Works

Open Intelligence is the foundational Large Marketing Model. It represents a new category of intelligence: one applied specifically to marketing and trained on commercial, geographic, cultural, and behavioural data.

Just as Large Language Models (LLMs) generate intelligence and content from human language and imagery, the 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.

From this foundational intelligence, WPP 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.

WPP then uses platform-specific activation models to transform audiences and performance signals into data patterns and targeting rules across a partner’s entire footprint. The network of Open Intelligence partnerships enables WPP 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.

This privacy-by-default methodology is unique in its ability to activate at scale across both direct and programmatic inventory, with interoperability across all major ad technologies.

Intelligence Beyond Identity: A New Marketing Paradigm

WPP built Open Intelligence to solve a core paradox in modern marketing: why does data-driven media use so little of the world’s data that is available to us?

The crux of the problem is that digital advertising was built on outdated standards that rely on just one type of data: Identity (ID). Shifting consumer behaviour, tightening regulations, and rising privacy expectations are narrowing the scale and accessibility of identity solutions. As a result, relying on identity alone is like looking through a keyhole at the vast and rich volumes of data being generated every second.

WPP wants to empower marketers to access many more types of data, at much greater scale, to transform media experiences for consumers and maximise marketing effectiveness. The team’s approach isn’t to reject identity data, but to outperform it by combining 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 WPP unlocks 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 the WPP team understands who they are reaching with their campaigns but goes much further. By training AI models against multiple dimensions of data, the WPP team finds they 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.

Open Intelligence is a privacy-by-default solution. It builds on WPP’s recent acquisition of InfoSum’s decentralised, multi-party collaboration technology, enabling secure federated learning and advanced data modeling. Marketers use Open Intelligence to train their own custom marketing models without ever moving, copying, or sharing data. AI does all the legwork, protecting consumer trust and preserving competitive differentiation.
Built for Marketers. Designed for Performance.

With Open Intelligence, WPP clients will now be able to:

• Train custom models based on their unique data, marketing intelligence, and business objectives
• Continuously optimise audience segmentation, creative development, and media buying
  Generate predictive signals from customer data, enriched with the world’s best media and retail intelligence
• Make faster, smarter marketing decisions that improve ROI and reduce wasted spend
  Deliver personalised campaigns across every channel - reaching 5 billion people globally, with full regulatory compliance and consumer trust built in

Fully Integrated. End-to-End.

Open Intelligence is the universal model supporting all the functionality in WPP Open – the AI-enabled marketing platform the team uses to connect WPP’s teams, data, tools, and AI – further enhancing the powerful capabilities of its end-to-end workflow. The model will power every part of WPP’s offer, from insight and audience generation to campaign planning, activation, and measurement. Marketing strategy, campaign performance, and media supply will all be enhanced and optimised by a new generation of AI-native tools and scaled, safe, and secure data.

Enabled by the world’s leading data and technology companies and media platforms

WPP has launched Open Intelligence with support from a range of world-class partners, including:

• Technology partners: FreeWheel, Google, and Microsoft Advertising
• Data and measurement partners: Adelaide, Adstra, Circana, Experian, and Lumen Research
• Digital platform partners: Meta, Snap Inc., and TikTok.

Partners will bring unique value to Open Intelligence’s speed, performance, and reach including:

• Cloud, compute, and platform infrastructure to support real-time model orchestration and global-scale delivery.
• Access to high-velocity, closed-loop behavioural data and culture-shaping engagement signals across the world’s most engaged-with social platforms.
• Model enrichment with deep, consented intelligence across commercial, geospatial, cultural, and demographic datasets.

Together, these partners supercharge the capabilities of Open Intelligence with the most trusted, comprehensive, and future-ready data network and infrastructure ecosystem in the industry.

Partners involved in the launch of Open Intelligence shared the following perspectives:

“This expanded Open Intelligence collaboration with WPP Media, powered by Google Cloud's Spanner Graph, is a significant advancement in AI-driven marketing. We anticipate this collaboration will deliver enhanced client outcomes and measurable value on Google's Ad platforms” said Paul Limbrey VP, global client and agency solutions at Google.

"We're excited to partner with WPP on Open Intelligence, which will empower our shared clients with deeper, privacy-preserving insights into audience behaviour. This collaboration means even smarter targeting and more effective campaigns that deliver real value for brands looking to connect with Snapchat's unique community” said Ajit Mohan, chief business officer at Snap Inc.

"By integrating Experian’s identity and consumer insights with WPP’s Open Intelligence framework, we help brands move beyond fragmented identity solutions to a comprehensive 'Intelligence Beyond Identity' approach. Together, we can develop and implement customised models that reveal richer audience signals, optimise media strategies, and demonstrate business impact.” said Chris Feo, chief business officer at Experian.

"With Freewheel and Open Intelligence, advertisers will have the most direct access to premium streaming inventory while also matched and measured with publisher’s unique identity infrastructure in a secure and privacy centric manner. This partnership provides an opportunity for WPP clients to reach their high value audiences while minimising tech hops to drive efficiency and effectiveness of outcomes.” said Kris Magel, vice president, global agency partnerships at FreeWheel.

"Open Intelligence is changing the game for global advertisers; this is a tectonic shift away from IDs that have restricted our industry for years. We are delighted to be a key global attention partner for Choreograph and would like to thank everyone involved at WPP Media for their confidence in the people, product and service at Lumen Research.” said Matt Bennathan, chief commercial officer at Lumen Research.

"Congratulations to WPP on the launch of Open Intelligence, a bold step forward in connecting data, AI, and outcomes at scale. We’re proud that Adelaide’s AU metric is embedded in the Large Marketing Model, setting a new standard for outcome-based media quality and enabling brands to plan, activate, and optimise with real attention and real results. This marks a major milestone for the industry and reflects WPP's ongoing commitment to innovation.” said Marc Guldimann, CEO and co-founder, Adelaide.

What’s next?

Open Intelligence will roll out to clients in a phased approach over the course of 2025.

The integrations are part of an ongoing rollout as WPP onboard new partners and extend Open Intelligence capabilities across formats and regions.