Connect Your Data, Transform Your Growth

Media Minute is WPP Media's series, specifically crafted to empower our clients and marketers for their intelligence era.

Remember when the advertising ecosystem revolved around IDs? IDs enabled smart ad delivery, allowing brands to engage consumers more effectively. Instead of showing you the same ad for an item you just viewed, they ensured you weren't bombarded with the same message repeatedly.   

Sophisticated controls over ad exposure prevented fatigue and allowed for planned message sequencing. IDs also provided foundational insights into which touchpoints contributed to conversions, tracking the user journey. The goal was to personalize campaigns, making ads feel more relevant and less like random noise. 

The Grass Isn’t Greener on the ID-only Side 

However, relying solely on digital IDs revealed significant downsides. Brands overly dependent on third-party cookies now find themselves in a fragile position, as these cookies are being phased out due to privacy concerns. 

User trust has become paramount. Consumers, increasingly aware of personal data tracking, have driven a push for greater privacy, leading to new regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and browser changes that allow users to opt-in or out of tracking.   

When those cookies started crumbling, who had the answers? The major players like Google, Meta, and Amazon, with their vast troves of first-party user data. To reach consumers, brands are now forced to operate within their "walled gardens," further consolidating their power.   

It’s Time to Think Bigger 

It's time to embrace an AI-driven approach that fuels business performance in the AI era. An approach that helps brands bring together the world’s data, discover the formula for growth, and activate that growth everywhere. This enables more effective marketing by identifying growth opportunities inaccessible to ID-only matching. 

Open Intelligence, WPP’s AI-powered data solution transforms how brands discover, plan, activate, and measure. It offers unparalleled data collaboration between brands, WPP, and 350+ global partners - even walled gardens. 

Find and Translate Data 

Instead of focusing on the who is behind consumer behavior, brands must understand the why. Focusing only on IDs and associated attributes limits a brand's ability to learn why their audience responds to marketing and what drives them to take the next action. 

Open Intelligence uses AI to find and translate patterns across diverse data sources. It can also find and unlock insights in first-party data that other solutions miss – for example, using billions of combinations of data signals about context, behavior, location, interests, content consumption to predict valuable consumer even when an ID match can’t be made.  

This includes reaching audiences within walled gardens and on devices that do not permit ID-based tracking (example; Safari on iOS). Open Intelligence can reach those audiences in ways ID solutions simply cannot even see.  

More than expansive reach, it’s Intelligence beyond ID 

Open Intelligence informs every part of your business, every step of a campaign, across every single channel. It transforms the value of client data into brand-exclusive, net-new, predictive intelligence about consumers. This intelligence can be seamlessly activated across earned, owned, paid, shared channels, even walled gardens – in hours, not weeks. 

This intelligence powers bespoke insight, audience, activation, and measurement models trained on brand first-party data and business goals. Brands can confidently plan, activate, and refine marketing strategies across any and all channels, with greater speed, scale, and predictive performance. 

ID-only solutions only speak the language of ID, isn’t it time for your brand to be fluent in the future?