Zirca Digital Solutions, a 360-degree digital solutions provider has partnered with Singapore-based Blockchain solutions provider Aqilliz to offer audience targeting with greater personalisation and privacy compliance.
Given the fast-changing marketing landscape, Zirca has stayed ahead of the curve by recognising the need to optimise processes across the advertising supply chain and offer holistic digital solutions. Zirca will do this by integrating Aqilliz’s technology into its products, thus adding even greater value to its offerings.
With this pro-market agreement, Zirca becomes the first company to use this technology in the ad tech domain in India. Zirca will offer Aqilliz’s suite of solutions leveraging three core technologies in blockchain, differential privacy, and federated discovery with data provenance to its domestic and global customer base.
On the back of this development, MediaNews4U spoke to Neena Dasgupta, CEO & Director at Zirca Digital Solutions, Karan Gupta, Managing Director at Zirca Digital Solutions and Gowthaman Ragothaman, Chief Executive Officer, CEO of Aqilliz on the partnership and how is it going to change the digital marketing landscape in the new normal.
Neena Dasgupta
How did this partnership with Aqilliz come about?
The arrangement was outcome of two like-minded brands coming together for a common goal of providing higher transparency and more privacy to the clients. We at ZIRCA have been keeping a keen eye on the digital ecosystem and the trends that are beginning to take shape and it is our firm belief that the blockchain technology has potential to provide holistic solutions to marketeer’s problems. Aqilliz’s expertise in the block chain technology and ZIRCA’s proprietary products is a potent combination that poses to revolutionise the digital marketing scenario in India.
Not just the right technology and expertise, Aqilliz also shares the ZIRCA’s vision of providing its clients and partners the best possible solution and driving higher ROI for them.
This partnership will offer audience targeting with greater personalisation and privacy compliance, can you elaborate on this?
The partnership will bring about solutions that will deliver high fidelity audience targeting in a cookie-less world, led by cutting-edge insights and technology. This builds on ZIRCA’s ContentiQ promise of a unified dashboard, which offers a one of its kind solution for clients to monitor their spends across platforms and offer them a single source of truth for the data. As we progress towards a cookie-less world, marketers will need solutions that help them target audiences in a manner that is relevant yet mindful of their privacy.
A Federated approach involving Brands and Publishers will enable the creation of richer, more holistic audience profiles than would be possible by creating identities based on just a selection of Publishers only.
Data privacy legislation will need the industry to adapt to this new reality sooner rather than later and a Federated Identity Management will be required to:
- Maintain records of data processing activities to prove compliance and help fulfil the data owner’s obligations towards the data subjects and respond to requests
- Limit the use of the consumer’s personal information to that which is necessary to perform the business purpose.
- Protect the integrity of personal data through the use of methods such as de-identification and encryption; prevent the unauthorized access, modification, disclosure or destruction of personal data
The blockchain component of the solution ensures that actions taken at each step in relation to the customer data are stored on a transparent, immutable ledger, providing Provenance of data required by regulation. The partnership will enable solutions based on the core components of differential privacy, federated learning and blockchain.
How will this partnership help Zirca in bettering their clients’ communication in this crisis scenario?
ZIRCA has always endeavoured to bring solutions that will make future proof our client’s marketing communications. The partnership will unlock value via transparency and privacy that will enable them (clients) to continue connecting to their consumers through meaningful conversations. In unpredictable times like today and otherwise also, ZIRCA solutions can help them reduce the leakage of efforts that happen in manually reconciling the efforts of their campaigns. We can enable them to focus on the campaign outcomes and improving their communications with better campaign insights. With our solutions, we can help our brand partners to focus on what they do best; i.e. wow their consumers with their products. The privacy solutions will not only help them adapt to privacy laws when they come into existence but will help them become future-ready for a future that is going be different yet certain.
Karan Gupta
In this pandemic and lockdown how did ZIRCA up the quotient of their client’s communication strategy?
We believe that during times of crisis, such as the one we faced during the COVID-19 lockdown, it is important for a brand to develop a strong communication strategy and continue to engage with its consumers, albeit with newer, more situation appropriate messages.
Using our proprietary tool, Consumer IQ and the experience of our CreativeIQ team, we were able to help brands create customised content for their consumers and track the efficiency of their campaign strategy using ContentIQ. This helped them remain agile in their communication while driving the most value for their spends during these hard times. The upgrade to our products along with the technology of our partners allows us to stay one step ahead of the market and provide our customers with more future-ready services.
Way forward for Zirca post the partnership with Aqilliz?
Our partnership with Aqilliz has created the opportunity to explore the multiple uses of blockchain across the media and advertising space. While we engage with clients from different sectors to provide them with our blockchain enhanced services, we also keep improving on and evolving our own products. Zirca Labs is an innovation hub within the company that is constantly churning out new ideas that allow us to provide the best services to our clients, even in a quickly evolving industry such as ours.
Gowthaman Ragothaman
Aqilliz is a technology company that specialises in building blockchain-based technology. How is the new partnership with Zirca in terms of building a better and collaborative digital marketing system?
Aqilliz is a technology company that first and foremost develops solutions that unifies the fragmented digital marketing ecosystem. We have a team of specialists who are at the intersection of marketing and technology and who understands the challenges from both sides. We are able to bring state-of-the-art techniques from research to real-world applications—this coupled with our team’s collective experience and understanding of the challenges that continue to impact brands, marketers, and publishers alike today, are what set us apart from other tech players in the space.
As brands and marketers continue to evaluate existing MarTech investments, they can no longer afford to look at the challenges that are internal to them, but also opt for tools that provide safe, secure and compliant sharing of their data assets with the larger ecosystem. A more collaborative digital marketing system is one that is ultimately anchored by uniform standards in data protection compliance—by setting a new standard, we hope to see more brands coming on board our respective ecosystems.
Data is the new oil, your thoughts?
The modern consumer generates an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day—a clear testament to the extent to which our lives have been so reliant on a growing digital economy. Indeed, data is the new oil, but much like the commodity, its true value is derived from the quality of the insights and learnings that can be acted upon. Today there are many solutions that are able to provide collaborative insights but there are only a few who can take these insights and act on it in real-time.
Over time, we can only expect to see an even greater emphasis on data-driven advertising and marketing. Amid a crowded commercial landscape, consumers have come to expect personalisation as a means of arriving at exactly what they’re looking for—perhaps, even before they know what that is—and data is essential to this. What has effectively altered the rules of consumer engagement, however, is this growing focus on privacy rights. Data has its value, only when it is acted upon. Marketers can no longer afford to collect and apply it blindly. To leverage consumer loyalty and build on existing trust, marketers must put consumer needs first, investing in the right infrastructures that enable privacy compliance without compromising on customisation.
Brands today post-covid have gone digital with a vengeance, how will the partnership benefit your brands?
The coronavirus pandemic has certainly encouraged digitalisation at scale, but the digital transformation journey needs to be embarked on strategically. Existing campaign management systems are only built for internal data, not for collaboration with other enterprises. For brands investing in new technologies, it’s crucial to choose interoperability and open-source collaboration. In working together with Zirca, we hope to elevate the standard of today’s audience targeting solutions to better imbue them with the principles of privacy-by-design collaboration.
Bolstered by our range of offerings that leverage emerging technologies such as blockchain, differential privacy, and federated discovery, brands stand to benefit from MarTech solutions that not only offer a smarter model of automation and therefore, increased productivity and efficiency. In working together, we equally hope to highlight the need to put consumer privacy front and centre.
