Programmatic’s next challenge: More data, tighter permissions & fragmented walled gardens

The future of programmatic advertising may not be determined by how much consumer data brands can collect, but by how responsibly and effectively they can use the data they are actually permitted to access.

That was a recurring theme during a panel on “The Future of Programmatic in a Privacy-First World” at the e4m Real Time Programmatic Conference where marketers and ad-tech leaders discussed the shift from third-party cookies to consent-led data strategies, the growing importance of first-party data, walled gardens, clean rooms, personalisation and measurement.

For Castrol’s Vice President and Head of Marketing Kaushik Vedula, the starting point is the consumer rather than the technology.

“Customers are not living a life of digital marketing, or non-digital marketing. A customer is in his or her own life journey,” he said, arguing that access to consumer data does not automatically translate into business. “If I have access to consumer data, be it in the form of cookie or first time 1P data, that doesn't necessarily mean he or she will give me business.”

His larger point was that consent alone is not enough. “Consent matters. But what we do with that consent is more important.”

That distinction is becoming increasingly relevant as privacy regulation reshapes how brands can collect, retain and activate consumer information. The panel pointed to the changing regulatory environment in India and the growing emphasis on permission around data usage.

First-party data is valuable. Activating it is another problem
The industry has spent years encouraging brands to build first-party data assets. But having the data sitting inside an organisation does not necessarily mean it is ready for programmatic activation.

Jayant Basantani, Vice President, India Business, Mobavenue, said organisations often have consumer information distributed across CRM systems, call centres, business teams and other functions, making it difficult to translate that information into usable audiences.

He pointed to a practical problem around audience building and suppression lists. Without the right technical infrastructure or the ability to pass audiences into activation platforms, brands can end up targeting users they already know or have already converted, undermining campaign efficiency.

For HDFC Life’s SVP - E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Francis Rodrigues, the challenge is also about what brands are actually permitted to do with the information they collect. “First-party data definitely helps. Can you action all of it? Not really, and increasingly even less so,” Rodrigues said.

He noted that consent increasingly needs to be explicit about what the data will be used for, while sector-specific regulations can place further limits on activation. In BFSI, for instance, certain categories of financial and medical information remain off limits for marketing use.

That makes data strategy less about simply accumulating more information and more about understanding what can be legitimately activated, for what purpose and at what point in the consumer journey.

The walled garden problem gets bigger
The panel also highlighted another complication: the digital ecosystem itself has become increasingly fragmented. Vivek Das, Chief Digital Officer, Madison World, pointed out that while Google and Meta once represented the dominant walled gardens, commerce platforms, connected TV and other digital players have increasingly developed their own closed ecosystems.

The consequence is a measurement problem. A consumer may move between YouTube, streaming platforms, marketplaces, quick-commerce apps and other environments, while each platform retains its own view of that consumer.

For Nitya Ravi, Lead - Global Media, Godrej Consumer Products, the question is therefore not necessarily about choosing between the open web and walled gardens, but understanding what each can deliver. “The open web definitely provides more flexibility and more access,” she said, while also pointing to its limitations around the scale and quality of inventory. Walled gardens, meanwhile, can provide access to useful insights without necessarily giving advertisers ownership of the underlying data.

Somnath Mukherjee, Head of Programmatic & Performance Marketing, Reliance Vibrant, raised another concern around inventory quality and the need for human oversight even as technology becomes more sophisticated. “Technology is building up, but again, the human dimension is a must,” he said, stressing the importance of teams monitoring campaigns and the inventory being bought.

Measurement remains the missing link
The fragmentation becomes particularly visible when brands try to measure performance across platforms. Das argued that consumers experience these platforms as one continuous journey, while advertisers are forced to view them through separate reporting systems.

“The person watching Hotstar is the same person watching YouTube as the same person shopping on Amazon or Nykaa or Blinkit,” he said. “But they're all operating in their own silos.”

The result can be excessive frequency, with the same consumer receiving multiple exposures across different platforms without a unified view of how often they have actually been reached.

His call was for more standardised measurement across ecosystems, including greater interoperability around clean rooms, rather than advertisers having to work around the boundaries created by individual platforms.

For BKT Tyres’ Marketing & CX Leader Bimal Kumar Sahoo, however, the choice between walled gardens and the open web ultimately depends on the category and the job advertising is expected to perform. He pointed out that tyre purchases can move from felt need to conversion in less than 24 hours, while almost 99% of the category remains retail-driven. That means digital targeting cannot be evaluated in isolation from the final retail interaction, where a dealer can still influence the consumer’s brand choice.

“If anything goes out of equation, then the journey breaks. I did not have attribution,” he said.

Personalisation moves from historical data to real-time signals
The discussion also moved beyond privacy to what brands can do with the data they retain. Nikhil Raj, CPO, BlueStone, argued that personalisation is increasingly being driven by real-time behaviour rather than long historical datasets. He described the ambition as understanding the customer at an “n equals to one” level, while also acknowledging that consumers may ask brands to delete their information.

Kaushik echoed the importance of recency. For Castrol, he said different motorcycle users have different needs, making a single proposition insufficient for every consumer. “If I only bank on 10 years back data, am I going to be sufficiently personalizing? Not really,” he said, arguing that brands need to respond to newer signals and changing consumer priorities.

Basantani brought the discussion back to execution, arguing that the value of programmatic ultimately lies in converting data into measurable outcomes, rather than simply possessing large datasets.

The panel’s larger takeaway was therefore less about the death of one technology and more about a fundamental shift in what makes programmatic work: permission to use data, infrastructure to activate it, discipline around personalisation and, increasingly, a way to measure the consumer journey across fragmented platforms.

As Das put it towards the close, the industry needs to find ways to unify the consumer journey across walled gardens not just for planning, but also for implementation and measurement.