Rajeev Goel co-founded PubMatic in 2006 based on the belief that publishers are under-served from a technology and services perspective. PubMatic now offers leading omni-channel revenue automation technology for publishers and enterprise-grade programmatic tools for media buyers. On a short visit to India, Goel spoke about the rise of programmatic in India and how PubMatic is adding value to publishers with its innovative offerings. Excerpts: Looking at the recent Facebook data breach, what according to you are some key learning’s which can be applied to the use of data in programmatic? I think what Facebook did with Cambridge Analytica is very different from the rest of the programmatic ecosystem. The reason for this is that Facebook has personally identifiable information and they broke their own rules about who can access that data. On the other hand, how the programmatic ecosystem has done really well is to make possible that nobody is using personally identifiable information. So this kind of a breach cannot happen because we don’t trade in explicit information about who you are as a user. We use anonymised data so that this kind of breach cannot happen. So what would now happen is that consumers will question their relationship with Facebook. We have seen advertisers already questioning their relationship with Facebook. It will also cause advertisers to re-evaluate who they would like to spend their advertising money with and whether the data being used has adequate safety features or not. What are the key factors behind the rapid growth of programmatic in India? Advertising in India is around $10 billion industry and digital is around 15% of that. Within that programmatic is a small portion –around $250-$300 million. But it is definitely the fastest growing segment of advertising. Some of the key drivers behind it include huge growth of mobile user base, the other is growth in disposable income, which means marketers want to target those consumers and finally as programmatic grows to now more than a majority of digital spends in many mature markets of the world, the benefits that marketers, advertisers and agencies are seeing, they are now expecting those benefits all over the world. What kind of limitations do we see in the contemporary usage of programmatic? How is it being re-imagined? There are always bottlenecks. As I see, there are plenty of areas in programmatic which can be improved. One among them is video. Now we are witnessing a huge shift in video budgets, which have traditionally gone to TV. So there is a lot of work going on about how we can improve in that area. Moreover, as programmatic spend is increasing, marketers are increasingly looking at having a guaranteed ability to reserve inventory. While we talk about the use of programmatic and growth of digital ad spends, how would you explain the recent move by Procter & Gamble (P&G) which drastically cut down its digital ad spends? What P&G came to believe is that they were not spending their marketing budgets in the most productive way. So they came up with a code which stated that a checklist of items was necessary before spending the ad budgets. And they worked across the supply chain to put a lot of changes in place. This checklist approach has had a good impact in terms of cleaning up the supply chain. So I think it was a necessary measure to kind of step back and assess that the industry has grown rapidly and there are some elements which can be improved.