We had the pleasure to talk to Paras Mehta – Business Head at Cadreon and gain some insights into the data industry in India, how Cadreon looks at data, and what it has worked best with zeotap.
You can read the full interview below:
- Give us a little intro about yourself and the role at your company.
My association with the digital ad industry is close to 2 decades old. The pace at which the industry, products/tech associated with the industry and the internet, in general, have moved, have never failed to amuse me. The industry has never failed to keep me its student ever since I’ve started working after my studies. I have had an opportunity to work on various ad tech products. Had the fun of working on an ad server called NetGravity V.3.5, which was bought by DoubleClick and later DoubleClick was bought by Google.
Currently, I am associated at IPG Mediabrands’ Adtech and Programmatic arm called Cadreon as Business Head for the Indian market.
- What could you tell us about the data industry in India and how it has shifted over the past few years?
Gone are the days when data was used ONLY for planning and market insights purposes. Every marketer, every company today talks about data to address various needs.
Conversations with most marketers now are not just about ways in which data can be used during the pre-planning and planning phase. It’s also about how the same data can be used for activation, consumer insights and building market intelligence for the future.
- How does your company look into data and how is it used across the company? Which types of clients do you work with that demand the most data, and which types of campaigns do you mostly run for them?
At IPG, we firmly believe in Data-driven marketing and don’t consider it as just another buzz word. Globally, we have already invested in building exceptional capabilities around creating really meaningful insights on First-party data. We see great value in building and/ or using second-party data as well.
We look at audience data as an entry and exit points before pitching an idea to a client, delivering ROI and everything that follows in between. i.e. inventory planning, delivering personalized messaging at scale, campaign optimization and post-evaluation amongst others. In the era of multi-platform and multi-channel marketing, it is even more crucial and important to cross-pollinate user behavior and ensure continuity of creative messages throughout. Today, this is not possible without using the right set of data signals. We thrive to use it in the most effective manner possible to ensure we deliver a seamless experience to our clients’ consumers.
- Can you tell us about your journey with zeotap? Which zeotap’s data is mostly in demand? And how has it helped your clients?
Our association with zeotap started sometime last year. The journey thus far has been remarkable. We’ve used a great number of deterministic data sets from zeotap for a variety of our clients. Besides helping deliver better conversions, zeotap data has never failed to help us reach out to the right audience set at scale.
- Can you share with us your most successful campaign with zeotap up to today?
Recently for a very large multi-national company, we used Zeotap’s data for one of their biggest campaigns. In real-time and based on Zeotap’s audience, the brand delivered over 300,000 different combinations of creatives making each ad a complete customized experience for each user individually. While I don’t have the permission to divulge any more details, I can tell you one thing: it was possibly the first of its kind in the whole of APAC.
- If you had to choose one word to describe zeotap, what would that be? And how would you describe the team at zeotap?
It has never been difficult to work with zeotap, be it discussing data strategy for a campaign to something very basic. That makes them one of the finest and approachable teams in the data industry.
“Refined-gas station for new-age marketing” is how I’ll describe zeotap.
