Interpublic Group (IPG) is a global advertising and marketing-services holding company whose 2018 acquisition of Acxiom brought a large-scale identity and data-management business into its portfolio, and whose Kinesso unit builds cookie- and hashed-identifier-based identity-resolution products for advertisers. IPG's own website privacy notice and its subsidiaries' CCPA notices describe aggregation, anonymization, and sharing of personal information with IPG-related entities and service providers, while stating that at least one subsidiary has not "sold" personal information as defined by the CCPA. In 2025 IPG itself became a subsidiary of Omnicom following an FTC-reviewed merger, and IPG entities have separately been named in FTC antitrust proceedings and private litigation concerning data-licensing and identity-resolution practices.
TRACK RECORD
1 ENFORCEMENT ACTION
[2025-09-26]
The FTC's complaint underlying its 2025 consent order alleged that advertising agencies, including IPG prior to its acquisition by Omnicom, had coordinated—including through industry associations—on decisions not to advertise on certain websites and applications.
IPG's Website Privacy Notice states that IPG may aggregate and/or anonymize personal information collected through its site so that it is no longer considered personal information, and that the resulting data "may use and disclose for any purpose."
IPG completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of Acxiom Marketing Solutions (renamed Acxiom LLC) on October 1, 2018, with Acxiom continuing to operate as a stand-alone unit within IPG.
The FTC approved a final consent order on September 26, 2025 to resolve antitrust concerns regarding Omnicom's $13.5 billion acquisition of The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc., publicly confirming the change-of-control transaction and the terms attached to it.
On November 26, 2025, Omnicom announced the completed acquisition of The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc., making IPG a subsidiary of Omnicom, per an exhibit filed with Omnicom's SEC Form 8-K.
IPG's Website Privacy Notice discloses that aggregated or anonymized information generated from personal information may be shared with "our IPG-related entities" for the purposes described in the notice.
A April 2024 lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that IPG entities Kinesso and Acxiom used a data-licensing partner's (Adstra's) trade secrets to develop a competing identity-resolution product, a claim the IPG entities have not publicly confirmed.
The FTC's complaint underlying its 2025 consent order alleged that advertising agencies, including IPG prior to its acquisition by Omnicom, had coordinated—including through industry associations—on decisions not to advertise on certain websites and applications.
Technical documentation for the Kinesso ID user-identification module used in header-bidding advertising describes browser cookies being merged with a user's hashed email address on the server side before being transmitted to Kinesso for use in real-time bidding.