Apple's Safari Block Hands WPP a Fresh Case for InfoSum

Apple's Safari crackdown on cross-site tracking has a conspicuous non-victim, if WPP CEO Cindy Rose is to be believed. On the company's third-quarter earnings call, she told Richard Kramer, founder of equities research firm Arete Research, that the browser changes barely touch WPP because its data business no longer rests on the practice Apple is shutting down.

"What I will say is it doesn't really impact our data solution at all because we don't rely solely on identity matching," Rose said on the call.

The claim deserves scrutiny, because the practice Apple is blocking sits at the center of the industry's post-cookie plumbing.

What exactly did Apple block?

Apple declared open season on identity matching earlier this month, when it explained in an Oct. 19 blog post titled "Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure" why Safari had started blocking some of the firms that do it.

Identity resolution grew up as a fix for the cookie's slow death. When publishers and advertisers lost the ability to recognize people with cookies, they turned to the one thing many visitors hand over willingly: an email address, typed to log in, subscribe or check out. Sites partner with specialist firms such as LiveRamp, ID5 or The Trade Desk's UID 2.0, adding a small piece of code to their pages. When someone signs in, that code scrambles the email into a string of characters and sends it to the firm, which returns an ID. The same address yields the same ID on every site using the service, so advertisers can recognize the same person on a news site, a retailer and a recipe blog without a cookie.

Apple's engineers argue the plumbing pitch misses the point. Each site may only share its own customers' details, but the firm in the middle sees the same email arrive from all of them — connecting one person's activity across sites in a way no single site could. Apple also took issue with the consent framing, arguing that nobody signing up for a newsletter expects their address to end up with a third party.

Apple is not alone. Since the General Data Protection Regulation arrived in 2018, regulators and platforms have pulled the industry away from tracking individuals across the web, sometimes forcefully, often haltingly.

Why does Rose say WPP is immune?

Rose's pitch is that WPP saw where this was headed.

"We bought InfoSum roughly two years ago. We've now fully integrated it into our WPP Open platform. It is a data collaboration platform that relies on a mix of data sources from consumer identity to our own WPP proprietary data to live signals from our ecosystem of data partners, nearly 400 of them," said Rose. "We use all of this data to identify untapped growth audiences and predict consumer behavior and ultimately deliver growth outcomes for our clients. Therefore, I would say in the scheme of things, the impact on WPP to these iOS changes are minimal."

Read that way, Rose was doing more than playing down a risk. She was making the case, again, for InfoSum.

It is a case WPP has had to keep making. Plenty in the industry questioned the April 2025 deal, and the doubts grew louder when Publicis agreed to pay $2.2 billion for LiveRamp this May. Publicis appeared to have bought the industry's data switchboard; WPP appeared to have bought a niche. Five months on, LiveRamp sits on Apple's blocklist. WPP had already stopped using it by June.

The difference is where the matching happens. Apple's block works in the browser, cutting Safari off from firms whose code collects email on a publisher's page. InfoSum operates away from the browser: each party's data stays in its own sealed-off environment — in WPP's newer setup, inside the client's or publisher's own systems — with only the insights shared between them.

"The subtext of course is that their deadly rival, Publicis, is dancing to a different tune," said Charles Ping, managing director at M&A advisors Winterberry Group. "If Cindy can make the $2billion+ that Publicis spent on Liveramp (plus Lotame and Epsilon before that) by contrast look poor both strategically and financially on an earnings call then that's a strategic investor message nailed. And none of Publicis' acquisitions have delivered European capability."

Is InfoSum really clear of Apple's argument?

Not entirely. Consumer identity is still one of its inputs, as Rose noted, and connecting what different companies know about the same people sits close to what Apple objected to. It just happens with data the parties already hold, somewhere Safari does not reach.

"In reality, this does not mean WPP is unscathed," said Robert Webster, founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU and a former WPP executive. "It also need signals to deliver on safari and those signals have been degraded from them as from everyone else. Many of the ad tech systems WPP uses are equally encumbered, if not more so by Apple's policies — moreso because without the email match grids they are not able to bring tougher sufficiency login data to make up for Publicis' well known advantage in match rate across email graphs."

The caveat matters: Rose's "minimal" covers the data platform, not the broader media business that still depends on Safari-delivered signals.

What did the quarter actually deliver?

The comments came as WPP's turnaround plan appears to gather momentum. Its media arm — the holdco's biggest revenue source — returned to growth: WPP Media's revenue excluding costs passed on to clients grew 0.3% on a like-for-like basis in the third quarter, reversing a 2.8% decline in the previous quarter.

Getting there meant tough calls, none more closely watched than WPP's decision to sit out the pitch for Coca-Cola's North American media account while it fought to keep the roughly $2 billion Coke spends on media, data and tech everywhere else. Rose reasoned that pitching costs a lot of money and time, with no guarantee of a win — a calculation with extra weight because WPP had already lost the account to Publicis last year.

"We didn't participate in the North America pitch," said Rose. "Mostly because we won the rest of the world, and we have a huge amount of work to do in a very short period of time. I had people, many, many, many people pitching for many, many, many weeks over the summer. I was with them myself in London and Shanghai and Mexico City."

"We made a tough call between spending yet another six weeks pitching for North America versus delivering against what we had already won," she added. "It was a fine judgment call, which I made, and it is as simple as that, really."

Rose's InfoSum argument is coherent — but its durability depends on whether Apple, or regulators, stop at the browser's edge.