By Ashish Bhasin
Digital advertising is at the precipice of another revolutionary shift that will scale its global value to a staggering trillion dollars by the year 2026-27. Digitisation in the world of advertising has made a seamless integration and 60%-plus of the advertising pie is already digital. Over the ensuing years, this is expected to touch 75% globally. Digital will likely become the largest medium even in India by 2025.
A cascading challenge that arises for marketers in the absence of new and improved digitised solutions is to obtain a holistic view of the consumer. Digital giants like Facebook, Google and others maintain their own walled gardens of consumers’ data that can arguably generate an incomplete view of the consumer, who is living, buying and transacting across walled gardens and much more.
Thus, creating a stumbling block for marketers to assess concrete, real-time information. To address these woes, a one-stop unified view that provides an amalgamation of adtech + martech + deeptech (collectively known as madtech), is the need of the hour. What is needed is a platform of platforms,
for the want of a better word, like ReBid. There is an opportunity to create the world’s first global unified advertising and marketing platform that is
India-led, because India has the right talent, tech capabilities and now increasingly, the scale.
The future of adtech and martech in the media and advertising industry is definitely going to be platform driven and tech led. A platform where the marketer is able to get a view of the consumer across the walled gardens. The highest level of automation will be required due to the sheer volume of data flowing through. What the marketer needs is an end-to-end platform that does not exist today. Although an attempt is being made in a few parts of the world, nobody has yet been successful. Experiments are under way in Italy and Switzerland. It is a golden opportunity for the first India-out global unified platform to be built. ReBid from India is the first sign I have seen of a platform that can make such a mark at the global level.
Platform-driven advertising is the way of the future that enables a transformation in advertising and marketing through a range of tools, software, AI and ML to automate and help marketers and advertisers to form a comprehensive and enhanced picture of their consumers. The media and advertising sector’s future lies in the augmentation of these tools under a single, integrated and unified platform. But for that to happen, the Indian marketers and agencies need a mindset shift. Unfortunately, many of the large legacy agencies have been dinosaur-like in their approach to adtech. Those dinosaurs will soon perish and the agile, nimble, tech-friendly platforms will start emerging as key players. India has a huge opportunity here, and I hope to see the first India-out global unified platform to be built during my working lifetime.
The author is co-founder and chairman, RD&X Network.
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