WPP bets on privacy-first data collaboration as AI rewrites marketing playbook
WPP bets on privacy-first data collaboration as AI rewrites marketing playbook
Publish Date: 2026-06-03 04:47:00
Source Domain: www.fortuneindia.com
The next battleground in marketing may not be who owns the most customer data—it may be who can access the richest intelligence without ever moving that data.
That shift in thinking is at the heart of WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum and reflects a broader transformation underway in the global advertising and marketing ecosystem. As artificial intelligence accelerates demand for richer, real-time consumer signals and governments tighten privacy rules, marketers are being pushed to rethink decades-old assumptions around data ownership.
Speaking to Fortune India, Richard Knott, SVP APAC at InfoSum, and Vishal Jacob, President, Choreograph, WPP Media South Asia, said brands entering the AI era will increasingly compete on their ability to collaborate across ecosystems rather than simply expand proprietary databases.
“The world is experiencing two major changes simultaneously—AI and increasing privacy legislation,” said Knott. “AI requires significantly larger volumes of high-quality data signals than organisations can realistically generate and maintain internally.”
For years, the marketing industry treated first-party data as its most valuable asset. The playbook centred on collecting consumer information, building identity graphs and improving targeting precision. But AI, according to WPP, is changing the equation.
Knott argues that companies should start thinking about data the way digital platforms think about assets.
“Uber doesn’t own cars. Airbnb doesn’t own hotels. Yet they achieve scale through collaboration. Data is moving in a similar direction—from ownership towards access,” he said.
That transition is driving interest in technologies such as data clean rooms and federated learning, which enable organisations to combine insights across datasets while ensuring that the underlying information remains secure and under the control of the original owner.
The rationale becomes stronger as AI systems increasingly depend not just on volume, but on…
