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With the programmatic marketplace becoming increasingly bloated and fragmented, the challenge of identity resolution in a privacy-first, consent-based marketplace is forcing a total re-imagination of the digital advertising supply chain. Last week, IAB TechLab called out six critical business challenges, Google’s Privacy Sandbox must address. In my view, no independent company can offer a direct replacement for a third party tracker, because, it was never owned by any company in the first place. And it was FREE! Expecting Google to take on this responsibility and offer a replacement, and that too on their browser, free of cost, is not going to happen. There are no free lunches. 


I have tried to bring those six critical business challenges into two broad themes. Firstly, there is a need to capture and carry both identities and impressions across digital advertising supply chain. Secondly, availability of first party data, or the lack of it and the related investments made by both demand and supply side need to be fairly balanced. This can only be done by an independent neutral function. 


Enter Curation. Curation provides the supply side an opportunity to leverage their data by giving more value to their impressions. It decouples data and analytics from technology thereby providing the much needed compliance for privacy and consent. You can call it DMP 2.0. You can even call it CDP 3.0. Overall, Curation helps in resetting the balance between demand and supply; and data and technology. The benefits are immense: 


1.A strong ad quality infrastructure with direct integration amongst all the partners offers control over data and inventory. 


2.As a neutral independent service, it rationalizes the digital ad business by solving for its current opacity and complexity.


3.It brings brand safe, premium, curated inventory to the forefront as against working with too many SSPs. 


4.It integrates new data sets and deliver auction packages with multi-publisher deal IDs in a scaled environment.


5.As a clean room, it brings efficiency through the creation and monetization of cohorts while keeping data secure in the native environment. 


With curation, publishers will be able to collaborate with data providers, brands, and retailers in a privacy compliant manner to build PMPs, package their first-party data with inventory from third-party publishers to sell to buyers. Curation shifts the power to leverage, back to the publisher from the DSPs and SSPs and rightfully help the publishers take control over not only their data, but also their partners data, including the advertiser. Clean Rooms as the Curator offers five significant commercial advantages.


1. Better monetisation of data: Existing DSPs typically only share impression counts with data providers, but curation technology brings a more granular suite of data points into demand – including advertiser, agency, publisher, placement, device, geo and more. Such insights are priceless. Data providers can understand which combination of ad formats works and how first-party data improves outcomes for buyers. By decoupling curation from the DSPs, multiple types of data across demand and supply side can be packaged into one PMP. Combining audience data with panels and context, will also to address the performance-versus-scale challenges of the new identity landscape.


2. Full funnel advertising: Publishers can now integrate their signals with retail media platforms as a full funnel PMP. Retailers just cannot simply make customer data available to many different platforms for everyone’s use. Walmart acquisition of Vizio is a very good example. However, there are quite a few other retailers who are not in a position to create their own retail media platform. Curation is a virtually free way for retailers to launch media offerings in a privacy-safe manner as self-serve PMPs without standing up their own ad tech infrastructure. Curation in the form of data cleanrooms, helps maintain buyer, brand and seller exclusions to navigate conflicts.


3. Real-time Cohort Creation: Publishers and their partners across brands and other data owners never have to move their data out of their tech stack – they simply apply whatever segments they desire against a curated PMP and have their third-party managed campaigns buy against that aggregate media product. Because the brand isn’t moving data at a user level across platforms and owners, they can keep control over their data and update their respective consent management system without any fear of compliant default. This helps in being dynamic in creating the segment and save huge amount of time is setting up the campaigns.


4. Efficient Self-Serve Platform: Apart from the top 50 advertisers, SMEs generally want self-service DSP capabilities. This is the single largest friction in the system today when it comes to the adoption of “audience extension”. A non-programmatic way, that requires a manual insertion order is the least preferred approach to audience extension. Audience extension also requires publishers to learn and operate DSPs, an investment that is hard to justify without much demand. Curation takes this friction away for the SMEs as publishers can pre-package their first-party data with third-party inventory from the open web, and make it available to them as PMPs in their DSP of choice – while still retaining control over pricing, packaging and access.


5. Scaled Up Marketplace: Curation also opens an exciting addition to sell-side video strategies from publishers. Scaled publishers with robust first-party data tend to have limited video content and vice versa. With curation, text-focused publishers can package their data with premium CTV/OTT inventory and give their sales teams a premium video product to sell to buyers. The end beneficiaries for curation are the brands and the media agencies. Markets are still evolving towards building their own first party data. Current data sources don’t often serve the full set of media buyers’ needs. Curation makes data integrations simple; saves a lot of time while sourcing CTV supply. 


Often, I was asked what is the difference between a CDP and a DCR (Data Clean Room). There is strong logic for such a question, and this reasoning got further enhanced when LiveRamp bought Habu to make their SafeHaven solution, really safe. Every enterprise now has an ambition to build their first party data. 


They all need a CDP. And for a CDP to be made useful and monetizable, they now believe they need a data clean room. It is all now becoming too expensive point solutions that continues to make the adtech/martech stack even more bloated and fragmented. In my view, data clean rooms must not be seen as yet another point solution. It should be seen as an altogether new service, a privacy by design curation service, that balances demand with supply and offers an equitable platform for all the participants. 


Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.

MAdtech Point: Data Clean Rooms as the curator in the digital advertising supply chain

When I started my career, as a media executive way back in 1990, there were quite a “ways of media planning” as doctrines that I came across. Amongst all, the one that stuck in my head is as follows: Media Planning is all about finding the right people, at the right place at the right time, often enough, under suitable environment to create the right response. Lots have changed in the media environment, but these principles have not changed at all. With one difference though. When these principles were written, there was an implicit understanding that we will be finding the right people with consent and not incessantly track them without their knowledge! Now after nearly 30 years, we are forced to have that called out as “responsible use of consumer data”. 

Data Clean Rooms does exactly that. It helps the media agency to responsibly use the consumer data. While there are many use cases for clean rooms, it is the media agency that requires this technology the most. In fact, in the post cookie world, a media agency without a data clean room, will just not be able to perform their roles responsibly. Let us look at all the five pillars of media planning and bring a data clean room to life!

Finding the Right People:

In the analog world, finding the right people was easy, but broad and less accurate. Media planners lived with that. Panels and Surveys offered broad demographic cohorts under which audiences were segmented. Consumers did not have many choices either, so their behaviors could broadly be classified under these demographic cohorts. We didn’t miss the target. In the digital world, a http code was attached to the consumer’s behavior and that started offering better resolution to the choices consumers can make and that led to supposedly better targeting. We still didn’t deliver better targeting, apart from a few cases where that http code could be transmitted accurately. Today, this http code cannot be randomly attached to a consumer without his/her consent. We will need a data clean room to filter this consent and transmit it. Without a data clean room, finding the right people is not possible. Do watch out for “seller defined audiences” becoming popular, though.

At the right place:

For a good long time, right place, largely meant, towns or cities. Market planning was at a township level at the best. Brand sales were indexed with category sales to help prioritise markets (remember BDI/CDI!) and that is it. In the digital world, that http code, we attached to the consumer’s behavior offered us even deeper zooming in to the places. We could track the consumer as to whether he/she is in a theatre or a shopping mall. Under the premise of offering consumers better recommendations, we could collect these details. 

The industry got carried away with knowing the consumers movements and occasions but forgot to follow it up with how this can help priorities markets/locations. Today, this http code cannot be attached without consent, and commerce platforms are jealously guarding this information for their own benefit in the form retail media network. They are not going to offer it free. We will need a data clean room to responsibly purchase this information for insights. Without a data clean room, finding the right place for occasions and locations will not be possible. 

At the right time:

Campaign scheduling was largely limited to weekly planning. For a good long time, “an eight-quarter media investment plan” will be followed with an annual media calendar and that will have a deeper quarterly media plan. For further details, this media plan was further resolved to have day of week, weekdays, weekends, and prime time slots to make choices on media vehicles. Prime Time was the closed sharpness we got to finding the right time until the arrival of the http code. This code helped track the consumer round the clock, at an individual level. And so, we started to split the communication to time of day, day of week, week of the month and further across occasions and locations; and we could offer customization in the communication as well. All without consent. Today, this http code needs specific consent from the consumer at an individual level to be able to address him/her. We will need a data clean room to responsibly purchase this information for activation. Without a data clean room, finding the right time is not going to be possible. 

Often Enough:

Whether it is Byron Sharp philosophy or any other customized insights, common sense, tells us that consumers hate to be chased too often. At a basic level, three times is enough. There is an old saying, “Tell them that you are going to talk to them, talk to them and Tell them that you have talked to them”. Three times is enough. Frequency capping is one of the hardest part of media planning. Every dollar that is spent beyond three times is a waste. Estimating the diminishing returns on media investment is the biggest thrill, I had in this job. Today, as the http code deprecates and walled gardens turning to become concrete jungles, frequency capping will be the biggest victim. It is simply not possible to cap frequencies across different concrete jungles; not to ignore the hard truth that it is not possible even within the platform itself. Significant dollars are being wasted beyond the diminishing returns in terms of advertising effectiveness. We will need a data clean room to build virtual identities across platforms to deduplicate. Without a data clean room, frequency capping is not possible.

Under suitable environment:

In the analog world, picking the suitable environment was the easiest job, so much so that this was almost taken for granted. Media planners along with the brand managers could chose the vehicles by name, page, and slot, so there was some quality control. An often-ignored responsibility, perhaps this behavior continued into digital advertising as well, but now paying the heaviest price when it comes to inappropriate adjacency of placing advertisements. Every single platform has been found guilty of ignoring this responsibility and paid the heaviest of the fines not to ignore the loss on brand reputation. Rampant use of made for advertising destinations that simply count the impressions goes totally unnoticed in the long list of “things to do” in a media plan. Despite initiating both “blacklists” and “whitelist” finding the suitable environment for placing advertisements at scale and speed is something that should not be compromised. We will need a data clean room that can match brand signals with that of publishers at a deterministic level to be able to offer quality inventory. Without a data clean room, placing ads under suitable environment cannot be 100% accurate. 

To create the right response:

For good long period of time, effectiveness of a media plan was largely restricted to outputs only. If the TV/radio spots were carried, the print ads were published or the hoardings are put up, the job ended right there. Slowly we graduated to outcomes that are measured in the form of awareness, what we now popularly call as “top of the funnel”. Digital advertising came with huge opportunities to close the loop from awareness to action. Popularly positioned as performance marketing, when clicks or sales were guaranteed, it was seen as a huge leap from measuring just awareness. It is appropriate to note that while we measured awareness across all platforms, we measured clicks and sales, popularly called as “lower funnel”, individually for a platform. Despite being data rich with all possible and potential insights that can be sliced and diced, we are still not able to attribute right outcomes for the right actions. We will need a data clean room to be able to connect all the platforms in a trusted manner to be able to attribute outcomes. Without a data clean room, measuring the right response is not possible. 

There is a huge opportunity for data clean rooms to play center stage in a media agency. And if I stretch this argument further, technically speaking, data clean rooms have all the capabilities to perform the role of a media agency. Digital transformation caught the media agencies off guard this last decade, under whose watchful eyes, emerged more than 50+ point solutions creating a luma scape of technologies. Responsible use of consumer data is a fantastic pivot, media agencies can rally themselves, to drive accountability on all the above 6 pillars of media planning.


Read More: <a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/quantum-brief/madtech-point-india-stack-for-indias-advertising-technology-stack-15959.htm">MAdtech Point: India stack for India’s advertising technology stack</a>

MAdtech Point: Data Clean Rooms are the new age media agency

I am not going to make any predictions for the industry this time. Last year, same time, media and entertainment industry across the world, made a few predictions for 2023. And totally missed the target on the emerging influence of AI. The same thing happened the year before that as well. There was so much talk about the disruption Metaverse is going to bring to our industry and within a year, the industry wrote its obituary as well. So, I thought, I should dig deep into what went wrong. How did we go so “off the mark”?

These are totally my learnings only and I am sharing the same. I am sure each one of us will be able to find many different reasons but find we must. How did we miss the emerging influence of AI, just 52 weeks ago? 

In my view, this all comes down to the choices. Humans cannot get past the choices we cannot make. Our ability to predict the future is totally dependent on the choices we make. We use our past experiences to project the future potential of these choices and make predictions. If we restrict our ability to make our choices to our own industry, obviously, we will miss the potential of AI. Ditto with Metaverse. And in fact, if we stretch it further, our ability to make predictions in the media and entertainment industry is diminishing significantly. Thanks to digital disruption. It is because, digital disruption is not limited to media and entertainment industry alone, but it influences our industry so so significantly. 

So how can we increase our chances of making right predictions? By expanding the aperture of our view of the industry. This can be done by collaborating with at least two adjacent industries. IT Services in the form of system integrators. Financial Services in the form FinTech. Some of the best practices from IT and FinTech offers us significant ideas and an opportunity to expand our choices. And here are three few provocations:

Why can’t the industry collaborate with NASSCOM in disrupting the 250 Bn technology industry in India? Ad industry can join their 3200 members, 9000+ startups and 30+ policy representatives in joining healthcare, banking, insurance, supply chain, telecom and internet. After all, advertising is the one that is funding the internet, and this only enhances this.

Why can’t the industry collaborate with an organization like Sehamati towards empowering the Indian consumers with their data for not just a better financial future, but also for all their social interactions online? By embracing a similar account aggregator framework, advertising agencies can play a much more critical role with PDPA, 2023.

Why can’t the industry embrace decentralization? Recently, Flipkart announced their partnership with Polygon in experimenting with a new age rewards program, FireDrops. A rewards program that that helps brands engage with their customers directly through gamified experiences. FinTech is lot more open and comfortable with adopting decentralized technologies, why can’t our industry.

Such collaboration for the industry brings in significant benefits to the media and entertainment industry. First and foremost, it offers huge opportunities and options for a larger talent pool to dip into. At an average, all advertising agencies are perennially working with 70% talent and the same talent keep circulating amongst the industry. Fresh infusion from adjacent industry at scale, helps open the aperture to make some more meaningful choices.

Secondly, it provides our industry a seat the table to play a critical and significant role in enabling responsible use of consumer data. Our industry needs another hand to clap. Brand building cannot be decoupled from Commerce and therefore a strategic partnership with FinTech players. Transparency and Consent Framework is not limited to one industry. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Most importantly, as digital advertising accelerates, we are facing with the challenge of big tech platforms building their own concrete jungles on the back of privacy to grab their share of the pie. There will come a time, when ad spends will end up across 8 to 10 concrete jungles without any means to measure their ROI on common metrics. What can we learn from other industries in fostering better collaboration? 

We cannot see past our choices we cannot make. Perhaps such collaboration helps the industry widen the aperture to help make meaningful choices. And of course, predict better. And prepare better.

And here is wishing the industry a cookie free, AI enabled future in 2024. 

Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.

MAdTech Point: How can we make better predictions for the MAdTech industry?

It was very interesting, this last week for the advertising industry. There were quite a few significant developments. For starters, ANA released the programmatic transparency report finally. Twenty-one marketers and twelve supply chain companies participated in the study revealing that only 36 cents of every dollar that enters a DSP effectively reaches the consumer. 


On a different note, Google temporarily started allowing brands to opt out of placing their ads on Search Partner Networks for all campaign types, including Pmax and App Campaigns. In the meanwhile, the CEO of a leading social media platform wanted one of the advertiser who boycotted his platform to be fired. And last but not the least, Meta said last Wednesday that end-to-end encryption would now be the default setting for messages and calls Messenger and Facebook, tow of the most widely used applications on the internet.


From accountability to transparency to privacy, digital advertising is going through one of the perfect storms in the recent times. And it is not small numbers anymore. India’s digital ad spending is expected to hit $21 billion in the next five years and as per Redseer's recent report, besides big brands, SMBs are expected to account for 40 per cent of India’s overall digital ad expenditure by 2028. 

Most of these SMBs will be first time digital advertisers and they will have be completely at sea with all these changes, ambiguities and challenges with the digital advertising ecosystem. Just the 15 percent of the incremental growth in digital advertising is close to 1 Bn dollars in size. A very attractive market opportunity.


Let us slice and dice these numbers with some more details. India’s digital adspend today is around 4 Bn USD out of which Google and Meta take away nearly 80 percent leaving 800 Mn USD for, what is called as the Open Web. Assuming that Google and Meta was not part of the ANA study and we restrict the impact of ANA study to the open web this essentially means that close to 500Mn USD was spent on technology to spend 300 Mn USD on advertising. 

And now if we assume that the status quo remains for the next five years, the industry will be spending close to 2.5 Bn on technology to advertise 1.5 Bn. The cost of reaching media will simply not be affordable and more so with the first time digital advertisers from the small and medium businesses. And their first reaction will be to jettison the open web and go back to the walled gardens. 


So what does it take to save the open web, if at all there is an intent for the same? It is important to dig deep and break down the various components that goes towards the cost of advertising. For starters, the report establishes that close to 10 percent goes towards buying data. And the platforms charge nearly 25 percent to run the advertising. Despite spending this 35 percent on the platform and data, nearly 15 percent of the advertising is not measure while an additional 10 percent is not viewed at all, not to ignore an additional 10 percent goes towards websites that are made only for advertisers with no real viewers visiting these destinations. 


Spending 35 percent on a platform that has only 65 percent productivity is unheard of in any other industry. This is exactly the reason, ad monies are stacked up with the walled gardens. Despite their own challenges, walled gardens at the least ensure that the productivity is delivered and their data is used in a privacy compliant manner. They can subsidise the platform cost for additional features and they have a business model that is working. 


ANA called out a set of key supply chain intermediaries who decided not to participate and there were quite a few significant names in that. ANA also highlighted that the key findings are representative of the broader programmatic ecosystem. For the Open Web to survive, the cost of advertising needs to improve very very significantly. Platforms need to take much more accountability in ensuring that all the ads they serve are viewed, measured and delivered on genuine websites that are not just made for advertisers. We cannot afford to charge 2 dollars to spend a dollar on advertising. There is a huge opportunity for these platform to capture the growing small and medium business advertisers, but this will be total missed if an efficient alternative is not offered. At the current pricing model, SMBs are likely to flock towards the walled gardens, thereby triggered a quick and imminent death of the open internet. 


MAdtech Point: Last call to save the Open Web

“Over the next decade, TV and Streaming, will converge and create a robust, individual consumer market of 500-800 Mn via handheld devices and connected TVs”, said Sameer Nair in his LinkedIn post. ICC Men’s Cricket World Up 2023 garnered 518 Mn TV viewers and 295 Mn Digital viewers across Star Sports and Disney Hotstar. There is nothing like cricket for content and this pretty much defines the size of the Indian market. There was also a discussion on his feed about how these are monetised questioning the profitability of these investments. A professional view is that the demand side already exists, but the key is the right price point. Both to buy and sell. Turth be told, we still do not know this price point. Streaming services, world over are NOT profitable. 

On a related note, last week, two of the leading content and technology companies, Paramount Plus and Apple TV Plus were looking to bundle their services to make their streaming services profitable. This is not new, Disney Plus and Hulu will be bundled together as a super streamer, just like Warner Bros and Discovery joined forces earlier. In all these cases, the combination of the services, cost less than the separate services. Bundling of services to hold on to the daily active users, despite being the leaders in the business of content, highlights just how quickly the content market is getting commoditised. And fragmented. And less profitable. 

Streaming services are just like any other direct to consumer solutions. Companies around the world, pivoted to e-commerce in response to COVID-19 pandemic and the consumer behaviour changed for good. From restaurants to grocery stores, to coffee shops to traditional retailers to even content streamers, every company was putting their online store, to sell both their physical and digital goods. However, as the craze settled down to go online for everything, the reality is dawned slowly that it is the large retailers who are still the primary beneficiaries from this behaviour change. This is because they had invested in the e-commerce capabilities with proper fulfilment, follow through and a full understanding of the ecosystem. 

McKinsey in its feature on Marketing and Sales practice, way back in 2021, talked about five traps to avoid risking crippling the ability to scale over time in e-commerce. First and foremost is the obsession to leading the e-commerce with a focus on technology, overlooking operations. Many companies did this mistake, even as their site went live, more often than not, they were out of stock! Secondly, almost nearly every company built a directionless tech stack without proper understanding of the ecosystem leading to a complex and bloated technology stack with no capability to rearchitect. The inability to invest over a longer period of time, poor understanding of unit economics and last but not the least building the e-commerce business very close to its core traditional business were the other three big traps. 

Bundling of these various streaming services in order to become profitable has all these five traps written all over it. A fantastic technology stack, more often than not, is today without a proper digital sales and operational leadership. The main reason big tech companies lead the advertising industry today is in their capability towards building a solid self-serve platform. In order to drive Search, Google almost independently built a practice called Search Engine Marketing with a proper certification course. Secondly, almost every content company today has built a direction less stack without a proper understanding of the ecosystem. Read measurement. Without this understanding, it is nearly impossible to find the right price point, for scaling up. Equally important is the appetite to continuously invest and upgrade the technology and not keeping the streaming service too close to the linear TV business. 

Most of the media stocks jumped Friday following the report on bundling of these services as it helps turn streaming services profitable. Essentially, this is like doubling down on distribution with same product. Increase access. Reduce price point and make it affordable. Ditto with streaming services. More pipes for the same content. In my view this is just the beginning. The commercial model for content production is very different from that of building the technology. Not all companies need to build the same technology over and over again and continue to invest in upgrading it, isolated from the ecosystem. 

As such Apple and Paramount, Disney and Hulu, Warner Bros and Discovery, when they start bundling their streaming services, sooner or later will need to synchronise their technology stack too. It is the same consumer, who logs in and out of all these streaming services. When privacy regulations kick in and consent management becomes paramount, each of these technology stacks will need to incorporate interoperable transmission protocols, for their own compliance, leave alone the friction created for the consumer. 

A neutral interoperable technology stack for the streaming industry has huge benefits for the industry. It enables the companies avoid all the five traps mentioned earlier. Companies can focus more on their own sales and operations. More importantly, they need not worry about investing in a direction less technology stack, instead they can focus on building a universally accepted unit economics. When technology is decoupled from content, it unlocks huge opportunities, as the companies can focus on proper sales and operations and not waste their precious resources of duplicating technologies. 

Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.

What streaming services can learn from direct to consumer companies

Last week Amazon announced partnerships in shopping with both Meta and Snap. Essentially, this sends a clear signal that Meta and Snap will not be having any of their own ambitions to be in the business of commerce, instead partner with Amazon. Not sure, this is an exclusive deal, but I would like to believe it is not. App tracking limitations and the related permissions and consent are now becoming the norm, first with Apple and then with Chrome, thanks to the tightening of regulations on privacy. So, unless and until you are super app, inability to transmit consent across multiple enterprises is a very big friction in performance marketing. 


With this partnership, Meta users will get a “Sponsored Ad Pop Up” asking consumers to give explicit consent to link their App with Amazon to get up to date pricing and delivery information, see more relevant advertising and get better check out experiences. Amazon will share with Meta, whether you are Prime member or not, so that they can offer other Prime exclusive features. 


This is not a session based consent. This is a “commerce only” button, which Meta can show on their advertisements from merchants on products eligible for Prime shipping. Amazon will not share specific shopping actions like purchases, product views and searches on Amazon’ stores, neither will Amazon share any personally identifiable information, which will all be gated through Prime subscription only. 


Innovations of this kind are very rare, particularly when two larger enterprises who are under constant scrutiny from regulators on privacy, are coming together to share data in a compliant manner. Amazon seems to have cracked this framework to be able to sign another such partnership with Snap as well. This sets the stage for a scaled up social commerce with more applications on our phone circumventing the App tracking limitations in iOS and Android. This is a marriage of convenience, with a specific focus on commerce, but now can be extended to various other services across mobility, commerce, banking, insurance and a whole host of utilities. 


Amazon has made their intent very clear to be the leader in social commerce without becoming a social media network. And social media networks like Meta and Snap have realised too, that commerce comes with a fulfilment responsibility, which they will not be able to live up to. Which is why innovations like these are very important and crucial. This sets the stage for new collaboration benchmarks. Most of the super apps today are not specialists in all the services they are trying to bundle together. More so, the deep insights, specialist apps can offer in the form consumer behaviour and attitudes just cannot be bargained for in a super app. 


What Amazon has done with these deals is to make other specialist apps to think hard about who could be their collaboration partners. This sets the stage for something between the app and the super app. A consortium agreement between multiple super specialist companies to share their data in a compliant manner to offer a suite of utilities. Not just in social commerce. But on a whole host of utilities across retail, media, sports, gaming, entertainment, banking, insurance, finance and education. Tokenisation technologies offers such neutral and independent services for a consortium. A utility layer, that offers collaboration capabilities for enterprises to share their data for a specific purpose in a privacy compliant manner. 


Innovation like this opens up new opportunities for normal “Specialist Apps” to strike deals like this for specific services. For example, a car company can replicate the similar construct with an insurance company were specific information can be shared for certain identified purposes only, for which explicit consent is secured in perpetuity. The point to be noted is “in perpetuity”. This is not a session based consent. This is a data sharing deal between two enterprises, as a bipartite agreement. If more than two enterprises want to strike a deal like this, ownership of managing such transactions cannot be with any one of them, one that will need an independent and neutral entity. 


Between an app and a super app, there could be an invisible collaboration layer that enables multiple apps to share data in a privacy compliant manner, circumventing the app tracking limitations in the form long term data sharing deals. Emerging industries like gaming is likely to take this route. Legacy long tail apps will need to think hard about their survival. Collaboration is the only option. 


Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.

MAdtech Point: What is between an app and a super app?

Google is on track to proceed with their planned removal of third-party cookies in the second half of 2024. The Privacy Sandbox proposals for the Web which will phase out these trackers are in various stages of the development process. Google committed to design, develop and implement these proposals, largely taking into account, specific criteria agreed with UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) with a commitment that these proposals will apply in the same way to Google’s advertising products as to products from other companies. 


Origin trials give you to facilitate this Google gave access to a new or experimental feature, in the form of Origin Trials (OTs) with a set of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This is in order to build functionality, and try out for a limited time before the feature is made available to everyone. All the OTs are now concluded and starting 1st October, 2023. Google started providing Chrome-facilitated testing modes that allow sites to preview how site behaviour and functionality works without third-party cookies, for a year. So we are now getting into the last lap.


Only sites, that have access to their customer’s purchase data have utilised this time to do something with it. Media properties or for that matter most of the brands or advertisers have not done much during this time to be part of the OTs and are largely ill-equipped to participate in the testing. 

Since the purchase data is rich in granularity, it significantly increases these sites ability to use their own digital properties to sell advertising to brands, much like a media property would. These sites are now becoming a very valuable resource in a brands’ marketing mix as this helps to engage consumers efficiently. 


In my view, retailers and direct to consumer brands are the only two sectors that are ready for the deprecation of cookies. Media properties and brands are still struggling to collaborate with different partners for better consumer insights apart from trying to build their own customer data.


In the meantime, retailers are now busy building their own media network to capitalise on this opportunity with third party advertising as an alternate/additional revenue streams. Forrester, McKinsey, eMarketer and GroupM all now project these retail media networks (RMNs) as the third big wave in digital advertising following search and social. With the growing popularity of online shopping for consumers, these RMNs offers their digital channels as useful opportunities to help brands reach and engage shoppers. But this is largely a large retailer phenomenon as they can afford to invest in building their own media network. Small and medium retailers are sub scale either due to geographical limitation or smaller purchase baskets for large scale collaboration and they are not able to afford to build their own media network. 


RMNs helps marketers potentially reach more relevant consumers by providing superior audience and shopping insights that can help make their “lower funnel” marketing activities effective. Private labels in the form of direct to consumer brands are still focussing on consumer engagement and not third party advertising as an alternate/additional revenue streams. Direct to consumer brands are now slowly beginning to look at building their own media network, by collaborating with their partners that compliments their products or services. It offers huge opportunities for marketers to make the “upper funnel” marketing activities effective as well. Essentially the spotlight is now on building their end to end media network. 


Building an end to end media network today has largely remained with a few big tech companies with deep pockets to invest and plan for returns over a longer period of time. Conventionally, advertising technology has grown so far by bundling data and inventory with technology, where the cost of technology is recovered or subsidised. Google committed to CMA that their privacy sandbox proposals will apply in the same way to their advertising products as to products from other companies. 


One would expect the same to apply to all the retailers and direct to consumer. And that means, that, when the privacy sandbox is concluded and released, a very significant “forking” in the advertising industry would have set in motion i.e.., the decoupling of technology from data and inventory, setting the stage for a “privacy by design” advertising technology. 


Such a “forking” event will bring technology mainstream into the advertising business and huge opportunity for advertising agencies to rewire themselves and build a totally new business model. 


Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.

MADTECH POINT