The perils of personalization in a privacy-first world — Gowthaman “G’man” Ragothaman // Aqilliz

Quotes

• “Personalization is a double-edged sword. There is a time where it crosses the boundaries of delivering personalized experiences to snooping around, stopping yourself from doing something more than what you would want your own consumer to be comfortable with. There’s a thin line at which it stops to become a more utility area.” - Gowthaman“What it means is that, it’s a relationship between two entities between the consumer and the brand and the marketer. Unless a marketer maintains a record of what’s been done with their consumers, we need to do what we call frequency capping off the communication time. That is a very critical thing which the marketers are all struggling to find some method of engineering to this whole personalization.” - Gowthaman“Today, marketers are trying to find the diminishing returns of where it stops. There are very conventional views of talking to the consumer at the point of purchase or at the point of sale where he or she is making a decision that is the most effective one. Outside of those moments of truth, price is more than enough.” - Gowthaman“Not just from a personalization point of view, it is also from the money or spending. So you’re actually spending wasteful money on talking to a consumer than you should be talking to another consumer to bring them onboard.” - Gowthaman“There is quite a few research that has been done, those marketers listening will definitely appreciate this concept of frequency capping. But the challenge we have is, frequency capping today has been done within the individual gardens. It means I can cap my frequency within Facebook, within Spotify but if the same consumer walks into different gardens, can it cap the frequency across the internet?” - Gowthaman“Personally, I believe as an ex-marketer, a good start is always better than not starting at all.” - Gowthaman“There is a privacy concern when it comes to personalization, in terms of what you’re saying, not how often you’re saying it.” - Ben“In a philosophical manner, it’s self governance. I would say it’s the best thing to do. These are self-inflicting activities so an organization should recognize the limits beyond which they can go. And consumers will also shake it off when they realize that somebody is going beyond the limits to do it.” - Gowthaman “I hear what you’re saying about companies that overstep their boundaries in terms of what information they are publishing or promoting to you. But there’s also the question of not just whether they should have put that information in their mailer. There’s also the question of how they got that information.” - Ben “I think that companies will increasingly become wary of sharing it with others for marketing purposes. When GDPR and CCPA comes into pause in the US and in similar regulation in each of the countries, these regulations will control this in a significant manner. It is still Wild West today in terms of managing data.” - Gowthaman“We enable more than two or three enterprises or as many enterprises as possible to safely and securely exchange their first-party data for their mutual benefit. That provides quite a few opportunities.” - Gowthaman“We’re giving a very clean environment for marketers and the brands and the publishers to use the first-party data in a better way.” - Gowthaman