Goafest 2022: Close to half of all consumers prefer privacy over personalisation — Gowthaman Ragothaman

The third and last day of Goafest 2022 saw Gowthaman Ragothaman, CEO, Aqilliz and co-founder, Web3 Marketing Association, share his insights on how digital will rule the marketer’s media mix. 

 

He started by recalling how different worlds were when he left India in 2010.

 

“That time, the digital spends were just a fraction of the overall ad spends, and it was only an afterthought for it to be a part of the media plan, even though digital was growing in other markets. However, now it's a double digital market,” he said.

 

Challenges of digital marketing

 

To give the audience some context into what’s stopping it from becoming the big game sooner, Ragothaman pointed out three challenges that the world and the medium are facing. 

 

He said, “There is a need for responsible use of consumer data. Globally, marketers are taking this as an important area of focus." 

 

Coming to the second challenge, he stated that marketers are struggling to get independent cross-media measurement into play. “If I have INR 100 to spend, what information do I have, to meaningfully allocate that money across all platforms? I don’t have that available, since the digital medium grew so fast in the past 10 years,” Ragothaman added. 

 

He also shared that the WFA (World Federation of Advertisers) deemed cross-media measurement as the most important area of focus, on helping platforms come together and share information, to help them conveniently plan better. “From our point of view, if we don’t get a hundred thousand crores in our country, in the next three years, we won't be doing ourselves a favour.”

 

The last challenge, as described by Gowthaman, was how marketers are using the customer’s data to meaningfully personalise content. He explained, “Everyone is creating content today. But, how can each platform meaningfully attract the consumers back to the platform?”

 

He stated that all these challenges combined, get one to a genuine open web crisis.

 

Talking numbers to validate the tricky situation, he shared, “Close to half of all consumers prefer privacy over personalisation. Two-thirds of advertising money is still not attributable to the business result. 80% of publishers don't know their own subscribers or readers. You have a readership, fan-following, but no regular signed up consumers.” 

 

What the consumer wants  

 

Gowthaman termed the open-web crisis as a trifecta of brands feeding into platforms and platforms feeding into consumers, with all three interchanging with each other.

 

“The consumer wants attention. Platforms want paid attention from them, brands want attribution from platforms and affinity from consumers. Each of these terms are not real-world terms, but digital values where the real challenge comes in,” he said. 

 

What’s helping build security 

 

Speaking about the scare that consumers have with regard to storing their data digitally, Go explained how blockchains work. He said, “In digital non-fear transactions, unless there is a small contract, it's not considered as a closed transaction and that's the problem we're trying to solve in finance and in marketing as well.” 

 

However, he highlighted the solution for this by naming decentralised clean rooms to store customer data that doesn’t leave the servers. “This can be used for meaningful attribution using a digital value. It is now also being used as a methodology for a safe and secured use of customer data, so you know how our data is being used,” he added. 

 

Sharing how this works for different parties, he concluded, “Consumers and platforms can engage in a decent way in the cleanroom, whereas brands and platforms can work in a distributed leisure. Brands can use NFTs to have a good relationship with the consumer. That is how this trifecta will come into play.”