Future & InfoSum bring audience data to WPP planners

Future has partnered with InfoSum to make its audience data available through WPP's Open Intelligence platform, giving WPP Media planners access to Future's audience signals within existing planning workflows.

The partnership connects Future's Aperture audience intelligence platform with InfoSum's data collaboration infrastructure, allowing agencies and advertisers to analyse and activate publisher audience segments without moving or centralising the underlying data.

Audience access

The integration will make first-party audience information from Future's portfolio of more than 170 media brands available for campaign planning and activation. Its titles include Tom's Guide, TechRadar, PC Gamer and Who What Wear.

Under the arrangement, planners using WPP Open Intelligence will be able to match client data with Future's first-party data to identify existing and prospective customers. The process can also be used to find new audiences with similar interests and buying intent, and to inform broader campaign activity, including offline and experiential work.

Aperture, Future's predictive audience engine, uses behavioural signals gathered across the publisher's brands to build intent-based audience segments. The system is designed to identify both obvious and less expected audience overlaps that may not appear through standard targeting methods.

One example involved a fashion retail brief that surfaced not only fashion and beauty audiences but also coupon seekers and tennis enthusiasts. Future said recent retail, technology and fashion campaigns using Aperture produced double-digit increases in click-through rates, alongside improvements in return on ad spend and reductions in cost per acquisition.

Data collaboration

The deal reflects a broader push by publishers and agency groups to use first-party data more directly in media planning as privacy rules tighten and reliance on third-party identifiers declines. It also underlines the growing role of data collaboration tools that allow companies to compare and use datasets without exposing raw information.

InfoSum, owned by WPP, provides the data collaboration layer for the arrangement. Its system allows data sources across the marketing chain to be connected without requiring information to be transferred or pooled in one place.

That model has become more important for advertisers trying to balance campaign targeting with stricter data-handling requirements. For publishers such as Future, it offers a way to place proprietary audience information closer to the point where media budgets are allocated.

Agency workflows

Future said the move is part of a broader strategy to extend the use of its first-party audience intelligence across agency and advertiser systems. The company wants to narrow the gap between the audience insights generated by its publishing network and the tools media planners use to decide where campaigns run.

Mike Peralta, global CRO at Future, said: "Agencies need seamless access to high-intent publisher data directly within the tools they use every day. By bringing Aperture into WPP Open Intelligence via InfoSum, we are removing friction for planners and making it easier to leverage our rich, intent-driven audience intelligence at scale. This partnership ensures advertisers can identify and activate high-performing predictive audiences across our portfolio of trusted, authoritative brands with maximum precision."

Nick Henthorn, global head of InfoSum, data and technology solutions, WPP, said: "Rich publisher intelligence becomes significantly more valuable when planners can access it where they already work, without requiring the underlying data to move or be centralised. Partnering with Future enables us to make its actionable audience signals available directly within agency workflows while preserving data privacy and control. It's a powerful example of how decentralised data collaboration can make first-party intelligence more accessible and actionable at scale."