Gowthaman Ragothaman on Aqilliz’s blockchain marketing platform

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have gotham in regatherman or g-man the ceo of achilles gman welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here today thank you ashton president as well for speaking to you today you're very welcome i'd love to kick off the interview by

0:20starting with a little bit of background on what you and your team are working on right now on achilles right these are exciting times ashton so when achilles was set up nine months back uh we positioned ourselves as the first blockchain based technology company for the marketing industry so typically when everybody talks about uh blockchain companies

0:42you immediately go towards bitcoin and cryptocurrencies but achilles is positioned as uh the first of its kind full suit company for the marketing industry and uh that our timing couldn't have been uh better than uh anytime ever before uh just six months back when google pulled the plug on cookies and the world is now reeling towards privacy-oriented advertising and

1:09marketing communications and the industry is grappling with very many solutions uh we believe we have a fantastic and the right solution for the industry so that's what is keeping achilles uh in the front right now and we are now championing the cause of safe and secure open web uh that's that's good to be that's fun it's very cool and yeah marketing

1:34solutions powered by blockchain are definitely going to be needed and there is a lot of benefits that we can dive into and especially in the case of achilles you've utilized the silica blockchain protocol uh to build on top of now can you talk a little bit about you know what did you see in the silica block chain that made you want that protocol to power the marketing

1:55solution sure thanks ashton before this uh this job i was in wpp and i was leading the initiative on evaluating blockchain solutions and that other time i was working with silica directly and that the key thing that attracted or allowed us to consider silica is the fact that it's got a shouting technology which which is which was then considered as a pioneer

2:21pioneering initiative considering amongst other blockchain platforms uh but in the last one and half two years time silica has really pushed it along keeping the heads down and making the technology work very well so today uh silica is leveraging this tool to to provide scalable solutions so as the node expands your ability to scale expands faster and larger which is very

2:48important for the marketing industry it's not like any other industry where you can deal with uh uh smaller uh uh nodes or or a finite number of people because we're dealing with billions of impressions so we need technological platform that can scale up faster and equally uh we are very happy with uh the smart contracting language silla which is safe and fast and secure

3:13so silica provides us both scalability and security which we can comfortably say that we can offer this to the marketing industry because uh marketing is is b to b to c and it's not just b to b or b to c so we need to sort out some of these things in between so yeah so we love silica and and if you look at it actually this is the rivers of silica so

3:36we are we are very close to uh working together on many of the technological innovations with them yep so it's in a good position yeah i know the the blockchain platform we had them on the show last year and it seems like the technology is so promising and you're right about the sharding having that level of scalability it was sort of the first you know first to market in terms of uh

3:58having that innovative technology to allow us to get to global adoption uh where everyone can use the network at the same time so i think that was a good choice and you know the situation right now inside of the blockchain industry on the marketing side is really interesting there's definitely a few companies that are doing a really good job with marketing but there's a lot

4:18more companies and startups that are not doing as well because maybe in part because blockchain seems technical and there's a lot of developers uh that are trying to produce products for the mainstream can you talk a little bit about how you see the ecosystem of blockchain companies right now and if they're doing a good job with marketing sure so uh i think it is good to have

4:41a category discussions on the applications of blockchain in the marketing industry but where we want to be different from others is we do not want to be it another point solution trying to solve a part of the problem because today there are lots of companies who are trying to say i'm going to solve transparency i'm going to solve identity i'm going to solve supply chain

5:06and it is it's all becoming another bunch of band-aids whereas the blockchain is supposed to solve uh for the entire system by by nature of being an universal technology right so we believe uh blockchain is is supposed to be the layer on top of the internet today if internet is already decentralized blockchain provides another layer of trust and transparency

5:32and then we just cannot be picking up one or two pillars in between we have to be the connecting tissue so we are different from other blockchain companies and perhaps that's what is giving us more traction today so our solution is to bring uh unify the fragmented technologies to one uh common platform so uh achilles and our engine is all about ingesting multiple sources

5:57of data standardize them use the smart contract to reconcile data sets and put it on an immutable ledger for further action if you have to say in simple english so we are uh we are a very unique different blockchain solutions company for marketing industry and the short answer is we are not in another point solution we are the tissue yeah well one of the major topics with

6:23regards to marketing more recently has been privacy you know and having there's personalization of advertisements for people but at the same time respecting their personal information uh so that you know we're not using turning them into the customer can you talk about the privacy and the blockchain solutions that achilles has yeah a very good question thanks for

6:45this because it's that's what we are discussing today uh and our product is being built for that in the world beyond cookies uh uh the open web as we speak today is under threat because uh uh it is now going to be dependent on first quality data which is where the privacy comes into picture today whether it is gdpr or ccpa or any such regulations uh insist on consent management as the

7:12main pillar for privacy and and companies are now trying to build their own consent management platforms to ensure that uh they are compliant with these regulations which is the first pillar of privacy having said that when a particular data is being used for action or let's say for advertising or any other marketing communication these regulations also insist or

7:38decry that the provenance of that needs to be maintained as well what have i done with the data okay so we are now talking about constant management and the provenance management of what's been done with the data which is the crux of the privacy challenge today and the reason why blockchain becomes very important is that when more than two companies are exchanging

8:02information then you need a decentralized independent body to maintain the ledger because neither of them can own it because if any one of them own it and it becomes centralized with one versus the other then there's no trust so it is imperative that in the future when companies are going to share data compliant with the regulations there needs to be a decentral authority

8:26which manages the constant and the provenance ledger which is what we believe as the fundamental reason for our existence so our product which is now ready to roll out and there are some good traction with the clients exactly provides this solution we provide the consent and provenance management for the participants so that activity is maintained and recorded in

8:52an immutable ledger that's very interesting and that sort of leads into the data transparency having the communication of specific data between companies and and data automation do you tie all of that into the platform as well that's right so our pro our proposition is very very uh simple and clear that we we said we tell the enterprises that data will not

9:18leave the native location we do not tell them tell anyone of them to give me your data i'm going to put in a cloud and i'm going to do something with it it remains with them we have our own federated query which queries the data from the location and only the query is managed for activation so we are very safe and secure in our architecture and that helps us in managing the

9:40campaigns very very efficiently and in a safe and secure manner so to answer your question yes our our engine takes care of ingestion and querying and activation very cool now i'm curious how else you see machine learning and blockchain changing the landscape of digital marketing in the present right now and in the future good question yeah so i i would like to see

10:08this entire uh future as a pre-cookie and post-cookie ease of life because there is going to be a next 18 months time which are probably colored as a free cookie world and there is a there is a state of denial with some companies but some of them are getting ready for the post cookie world so there is a lot of co-existence and there is cacophony i have to use the

10:31word uh the hard word for this so there are many solutions that's being tried and tested but i believe uh the post cookie world will have many of these things done and dusted and you'll have to probably have three or four solutions it's going to be applicable for uh enterprise deployment at scale and which is where the proverbial cookie crumbles today ashton so

10:55i see the next 18 months time many companies trying to do many things and we should try uh we should experiment with with what's what's coming at play but keep an eye on what can be commercialized and made scalable for a post cookie world and we really don't know how the die is going to fall when when jan 2022 happens but we are now getting ready for the world beyond

11:20beyond the world of cookies yeah that's really funny i haven't heard that you know the pre cookie and the post-cookie world before but it's i see that's the trend in which we're moving into now i guess if you do have any tips for startups or corporations that are looking at moving into the post cookie world and how they can prepare themselves for that yes yes if

11:47the if the steps are for startups in our industry i would say don't forget to try uh try as much as uh as it's possible but at the same time find mutually complimentary partners to work with because blockchain is a team sport it's not going to happen if you're going to go into a garage and sit and invent yourself because it's not going to work till you bring

12:14people together bringing building a very usable ecosystem is equally important for for for success of blockchain so find your partners find your ecosystem and build the prototype as early as possible and and then deal with principal payers which means uh whether the marketer an advertiser work with him to create a prototype that's my that's my advice good advice

12:42and if there are any corporations that are interested in learning more about blockchain-based marketing solutions or achilles what's the best way for them to learn more and to reach out yeah they can reach out to us uh uh uh goldman achilles.com that's my uh that's my personal or official mail address but they can always log into our website and reach out to us

13:05we're more than happy and keen to work with them we are already engaging with eight to ten enterprises today across different sectors like out of home connected television linear television programmatic identities uh the thing is everybody knows as i said free cookie and post cookie so this next 18 months is extremely critical for engagement i have to be in this business

13:30right now so we are engaging with them at the core in terms of building the new infrastructure and uh we're running more than five six trials today so that's what is keeping us busy very exciting well i will leave the links to those in the description box below thank you so much for the time g man all the best with achilles moving forward and let's follow up in the near

13:54future absolutely thank you thanks esther thanks for talking to you you