Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pubmatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy (Part 6)

Sri Gopalsamy: Forester has a research report based on the survey of over 110 publishers. They came back and said that this is one of their biggest problems in terms of aggregating multiple streams of data to get a holistic view. In fact, 56% of publishers agree that this is a big challenge for them. They’re looking for opportunities for someone who can pull all of this data together and provide them a single view. This is something that everyone will benefit from.

Anand Das: Say you take a publishing house, there are different systems that they utilize. Some people will use Salesforce. Some people will use other management solutions, integrate a particular server, and work with multiple SSPs and DSPs. Everybody has a different view or format in which they provide data. By getting all this data at an aggregate level, you can basically figure out how much you make at the end of the day. To figure out what it is that you’re selling better, you need to go down to granular analytics at the user level. Things get more complicated because when you look at the user level, you then have to overlay the audience data, which is not coming from one source. You need to overlay pricing data.

You don’t only look at the bridge that won. You also want to look at the opportunities that you lost. For example, you want to block a particular AdWord because you are doing a direct deal with that advertiser, and you don’t want him to buy through other channels. Looking at the amount of money that you’ve lost just because of filtering, you’d like to open it up. If you go down to that level, the data just keeps on increasing. You get into another channel. That’s where prescriptive analytics would help, which is a needle in a haystack problem rather than just creating pivots and charts. These are the changes that you should do.

Sri Gopalsamy: Most consumers now are becoming multi-device. They are using computers, work phone, tablets and they’re accessing the same content or same sites. How do you tie that to one person? That’s one of the big challenges that exists today. There are several people who are trying to solve this in terms of identifying, based on the person’s usage across multiple devices, that that is one person. You can target much more relevant ads where the revenue is much higher.

Anand Das: Then, doing this in a safe way where the user can control and can opt out whenever he wants to. This is to achieve the dream of an advertiser. At the end of the day, if somebody visits Nike on his laptop in the evening looking for running shoes, and in the morning when he’s about to go to his office, opens up his phone, and drives by a mall. Nike offers him a coupon. Getting a user to convert is the dream that every advertiser has. How do I achieve it across multiple devices? How do I follow the user rather than the device?

 Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pubmatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy
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