Rearchitecting the new Marketing Technology

from

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State of the Nation – Digital Platform Economy
Internet, as we know, is a decentralized network of computers with no central authority. Over
the years, this internet has become an integral part of our daily lives, redefining the nature of
business, expression and even human relationships. It has changed the way information
circulates all over the world. The manner in which information can now be shared has grown
in magnitude and value. Data is the new age currency. Digital economies are leading the
change. With minimal cost to enter, this platform economy is growing rapidly with numerous
providers offering wide range of services. Post COVID19 there is going to be an accelerated
adoption of digital platforms from more industries across entertainment, education, commerce
and most importantly, health.

From ads on Search, Social, Short-form video platforms to pop-ups, it’s been estimated that
the average internet user is served over 12,000 ads each month. And it is only going to increase
exponentially. According to a recent report from eMarketer, total market expenditures on
online digital ads in 2020 is expected to rise to $333 billion. WARC recently released a “COVID
Correction” of 8.1% for the current year, but digital is still expected to be at the 2019 levels.
Digital marketing is now at the center of this explosive adoption. In the past few years, it has
gone from being just banners on websites to a well-curated ecosystem of content with direct
impact on the real world. As a platform, digital marketing now functions as a medium of
exchange, a natively-positioned canvas that can radically shape how content is recommended,
curated and eventually consumed.
Often referred to as a platform economy, this is now a part of larger network made up of
brands, advertisers, publishers and consumers, where services are provided on-time, in a
convenient and personalized manner in exchange for some value. This value could be a mere
attention, or an engagement or an act of response. This platform economy has come to
command an ever-increasing segment of the global economy, disrupting traditional businesses.
By 2016, KPMG found that there were over 187 platform companies valued at US$1 billion or
more with internet turning out to become more than just an information highway, but one
where values are being exchanged. But this exchange in value between these stakeholders are
not symmetric, as their expectations from each other are becoming diverse and different.

This global marketing industry is now estimated to be $ 1.7 trillion as per the survey compiled
by equity research firm Redburn and PwC, in 2019. This proprietary study was done on all
traditional paid and digital media, in addition to owned media, paid promotions, sales
promotions and investments in data and marketing technology to arrive at this estimate. As
brands continue to employ new tactics to boost engagement and stay relevant amongst this
cacophony of messages, manual tactics are giving way to automation. Paid media as a
proportion of total expenditure was expected to drop down from 42% in 2015 to just 37% in
2018. Instead these dollars have been diverted towards primarily owned media and marketing
technology.
Increase in automation is attributable to multiple factors. Rising complexity in the advertising
ecosystem, investment in technologies to manage first, second and third party data, content
and channel proliferation to drive personalization are the key factors. Marketing Technology
now involves automated buying, selling, placement and optimisation of advertisements online,
and leveraging the underlying data. There are now more than 40 different platform categories
with a total of over 8000+ different application providers with different offerings, crowding
the landscape of marketing technology. As the digital natives and the channels rise, digital
marketing is growing in its size too. And so will be this cacophony.

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The Elephant in the Room – Asymmetric Value Exchange
Brands want to reach and engage with real consumers fully and meaningfully. Consumers want
access to content without spending much staying away from platforms with intrusive or
irrelevant messages. Platforms, in turn, want a fair exchange of value as rapidly as possible
allowing them to generate more and better site content. The expectations from these
stakeholders across brands, platforms and consumers are different, resulting in an asymmetric
exchange of value between these stakeholders.

1. Technology solutions are trying to address the needs of either one of the brands, platforms
or the consumers, but not for the entire platform economy in totality leading to a bloated,
duplicative administrative layer.

2. For a single transaction, this platform economy engages more than 20 different players in
the supply chain, whose interests, more often than not, are not aligned, resulting in lower
transparency and increasing loss of trust between brands, platforms and consumers.

3. There are just too many third party intermediaries involved in the value chain with no real
value being added in the process; brands are not getting a fair market value as most of these
intermediaries are acting as just clearing houses with marginal differentiation.

4. ISBA recently commissioned PwC to deeply study and report the programmatic supply
chain in the UK advertising market. The findings reported a 15% unknown delta in the
supply chain and highlighted poor standardisation of taxonomy as the critical reason.

5. Amid the rapidly crowding range of platforms, brands and publishers are vying for
consumer attention, without necessarily adapting their solutions to address existing
problems in the space leading to poor market liquidity.

6. Reaching real consumers remains a critical issue in the digital advertising industry. Global
Ad fraud is predicted to cost an unprecedented $40 billion in 2019 and could reach $100
billion by 2023, according to a report from Juniper Research

7. Personalisation is the cornerstone of the digital platform economy with increasing high
definition addressable capabilities. Often this comes at the cost of infringing an individual’s
privacy. Data driven marketing now needs responsible data practices

8. Consumer’s data is being packaged, sold and resold as a commodity, mostly in violation of
data privacy. Data Protection Acts will soon be covering 70% of the world population. But
the existing disjointed technologies are not capable of its compliance, in full.

9. ANA recently issued a statement that Google’s decision to end the support of third party
cookies in Chrome and joining Safari and Firefox, would threaten to substantially disrupt
much of the infrastructure of today’s internet without providing any viable alternative.

10. Marketing is now under a technology-siege; and that too in the hands of 40 different
technologies. Convergence of these technologies is now a grave need for this platform
economy to thrive and grow.

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Sizing the Marketing Technology Market
The MarTech industry continues to paradoxically consolidate and diversify, in-house and
outsource at the same time. Whilst the number of leading marketing platforms – such as
Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce etc., – are all acquiring capabilities to develop comprehensive
marketing cloud suites, there continues to be a long tail of specialised third party applications
focused on providing point solutions addressing a specific need. At the same time there has
been substantial discussion in the industry regarding the in-housing of technology and services
by brands and agencies over the last couple of years. While 2019 did not indicate any trend
towards more in-housing of marketing technology, the split between in-house and outsourced
technology is around 50:50 globally.

The need to respond to the regulatory and industry headwinds in the form of data privacy laws
and restrictions announced on the use of 3rd party cookies recently is only going to increase the
reliance on technology, furthermore.

• WARC in association with BDO estimated the global size for MarTech to be $121.5Bn
in 2019 growing at a healthy 22% and highlighted data and its collection and usage as
the “elephant in the room” for both agencies and brands. The report also highlighted
the rising focus on overall customer experiences over specific media.

• Forrester estimates that the growth of technology spend will outpace that of services
as marketers emphasise building customer experiences, automating more processes,
investing in innovation, and supporting more forms of mobile engagement. In US alone,
it is estimated that the CMOs will spend nearly $ 30Bn in marketing technology in 2018
growing to $50Bn by 2023.

• Winterberry, in their joint report with IAB Data, estimated that US market spent nearly
$12Bn in 2018, towards buying audience data for activation, estimating it to grow to
$23Bn by 2023 at a CAGR of 13%. The report highlights the need to develop
applications that will track provenance of data and ensure greater supply chain
transparency.

Based on these reports, we have structured the overall marketing and advertising technology
investments, as classified across three broad categories. This helps in taking a consolidated
view across both MarTech and AdTech landscape in one common canvas.
• Customer Experience tools (50%) across Email, Loyalty, Social Media, CRM,
eCommerce, SEO, automation, mobile, personalization, analytics, measurement and
insights with a primary focus on automating processes, workflows and content to
manage omni channel campaigns and digital assets through DMPs and CDPs.

• Audience Delivery tools (23%) including DSPs, ad exchanges, SSPs, mobile and video
ad platforms, search and bid management, native/content advertising and related
analytics with a primary focus on programmatic buying of advertising across all form of
media including Digital, Connected TV and OOH.

• Underlying Identities (27%) where any kind of commercial information in the form of
structured and unstructured identifiers of both consumers and prospects from PII data,
purchase history, behavior data across offline and online including new and emerging
technologies and related resolutions of identities.

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Customer Experience is now emerging as the high or critical corporate priority across sectors.
Personalisation is at the heart of this. “Investing in the technology that makes the most sense for
your specific business and consumer never ends” said Michael Williams, the former CMO of
Formula 1. Digital maturity increases the need for automation and rising spends in digital
marketing increases the number of marketing technologies that needs to be deployed. As
adoption of mobile phone increases, ecosystem based brand experiences across multiple
connected devices is equally on the rise, with new tools across engagement, automation and
contextual insights on a real time basis.
• Marketing automation in the US, through enterprise marketing suites, campaign management,
account based marketing and resource management platforms is now a $15 Bn market growing
at 9.3% CAGR over the next 5 years, reaching $26bn by 2022 as per Forrester.

• This report also estimated the investments made by the CMOs in the US across database
management and analytics to manage first, second and third party dataset; to analyse how
marketing performance is relating itself to business goals as growing at a CAGR of 10.9% from
$ 3Bn in 2017 to $ 6Bn in 2022.

These investments are linked to digital marketing spends. We have projected the information
from the US data to the worldwide markets basis the same. We estimate the global market to
be growing from $ 61 Bn in 2019 to $92 Bn in 2023 with a cumulative CAGR of 11%.

Industry is spending an estimated 3-4% of the overall marketing expenditure towards

Customer Experience tools.

As per eMarketer, paid media advertising is estimated at $665Bn worldwide in 2020, expected
to grow to $854Bn by 2023. Digital ad spending around the same period is estimated at
$333Bn worldwide in 2019, growing to $517Bn around the same period. The entire growth of
$ 185Bn in the overall paid media, over the next three years will be coming from digital
advertising only. In fact, post COVID19, we expect this to be upwards of $200Bn even when
there can be a slight deceleration in the overall spends, correcting for Q2,2020 decline.
• An estimated $120Bn of worldwide advertising spends are delivered programmatically from the
total $170Bn spends on digital display (70%). Programmatic share of spends is expected to grow
from the current 70% to 80% in the next five years.

• While $68Bn of these programmatic spends are placed through the walled gardens, issues
regarding fraud, transparency and provenance are effecting the remaining $ 54Bn which is
bought through a complex and crowded technology stack.

• Forrester estimates technologies related to serving advertising to grow at a CAGR of 9.6% from
the current $11Bn to $14Bn in the US by 2022. Projecting the same for the global market, we
estimate this market to be growing from $27Bn in 2019 to $42Bn by 2022.

Forrester estimates as a very high 43% share for the advertising technologies to the open
garden programmatic (excluding walled gardens). We have adjusted the same to 33% in 2019
going down to 25% in the next five years, basis the current trends in the markets. Based on
this correction we estimate this market to be growing from the current $18Bn to $22Bn in the
next five years.

Industry is spending an estimated 7% of the digital spends towards Audience Delivery and it is
estimated to reduce this to 4% by 2023.

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2020 is the inflection point for Audience Data. Digital advertising cross $333 Bn to take 50%
share of the overall advertising and is estimated to take 65% of the industry in the next five
years. Continued growth in online spends across multiple touch points puts data driven
marketing at the heart of it all. Marketers are fast coming to the realization that virtually all
media can be made “data-driven”, imbued with a richer understanding of the audience so to
power more relevant, meaningful, impactful and efficient transactions. Firms invest in a wide
range of audience data types made available from third party sources as a license (basis 2018
US data from Winterberry)

• At the base level are the behavior data of consumers and prospects across IP
Addresses, Device IDs, location data etc., estimated at $3.7Bn in the US in 2018,
growing at CAGR of 10% in the next five years.

• PII data in the form of names, address, email address of customers and prospects across
both traditional and digital data form the next tier at $3.6Bn in the US, growing at less
than 2% on the back of privacy norms and related concerns.

• Aggregated data of the purchase history of customers data is also being used to
understand intent and interest levels. This is estimated at $2.8Bn, these spends are
growing at less than 2% CAGR for the next five years, privacy concerns
notwithstanding.

• A new set of behavior data from consumers and prospects are now coming from
emerging and specialty segments including IoT and wearables. Estimated at $1Bn in
2018, this is growing at nearly 40% CAGR for the next five years.

• Above all this, the most important audience data type is in the form of resolved and
reconciled identities across multiple channels being used in the enrichment of profiles.
Estimated at $0.8Bn in 2018, is expected to grow to $2.6Bn by 2020 at a CAGR of
32%.
Audience data used for targeting purposes is directly linked to advertising expenditures. We
have projected these data sets from the US to be representative of the global industry. We
estimate the marketers to be spending nearly $33Bn in 2019 on audience data, growing to
$50Bn by 2023.

At an averaged the industry is spending nearly 2% of their overall marketing expenditure on

underlying data

Overall size of the marketing technology industry

US$bn 2019 2023

Customer Experiences 61 92
Audience Activation 27 41
Underlying Data 33 50
Total Addressable Market 122 183

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The Aqilliz Opportunity
A disrupted and crowded vendor market where consumers are demanding seamless
experiences is a perfect storm of market forces driving convergence. We believe these
disjointed spends across Consumer Experiences ($61 Bn), Audience Activation ($27 Bn) and
the Underlying Data ($ 33Bn) provides Aqilliz with an opportunity to see this as a consolidated
addressable market of $120Bn through an alternative enabling technology. Any fragmented
ecosystem requires harmonization, consensus and collaboration. Marketing industry brings
with it some additional challenges as well. As a platform, digital marketing economy deals with
digital asset exchanges, sharing of personally identifiable information and real time data
analytics, at scale and speed.

Across both identities and softwares, the digital platform economy is now an assortment of
decentralized, distributed and duplicated technologies. This is impacting marketing in the form
of poor authenticity and authorization, in as much as 50% of the investments. There is a need
for a distributed ledger where the records can be written, read, amended and authenticated
securely based on a common set of rules. Further, once a particular task is agreed as being
accomplished, by consensus, it can be authorised for automatic settlement through an AI
enabled smart contract. This brings in the much needed liquidity and efficiency to the marketing
ecosystem.
Rearchitecting a new marketing technology is needed for greater optimization, especially in an
ecosystem where multiple users/partners share and modify data and engage. There is also a
need for a timely verification mechanism as this platform economy engages with many
different partners with varied business interests. Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain
can enable this value exchange with increased speed of transfer and better process efficiency
by standardising data formats; reduce risk of fraud, error or invalid transactions and improve
auditability. This also helps in reducing the operating cost through de-duplication.

Aqilliz is able to identify these sector-specific challenges in the field of digital marketing to
develop highly tailored, blockchain-based solutions, helmed by a team of highly experienced
advertising professionals, entrepreneurs, and engineers who have an intimate knowledge of
the digital platform economy, they have witnessed the rapid growth and resulting
inefficiencies, and understand the needs of all the three stakeholders – brands, platforms and
consumers – in this economy.

Aqilliz is created in partnership with Zilliqa, the high-throughput public blockchain platform.
Zilliqa will provide the infrastructure for secure and scalable blockchain-enabled solutions to
enterprise clients. In order to address these needs alike, Aqilliz will be developing strategic
partnerships across varied industries such as advertising, media, marketing, technology, data
and analytics

Aqilliz’ strategy is to leverage the distributed ledger technology by providing a unified platform
that restores the balance in the value being exchanged between brands, platforms, and
consumers. A platform with an infrastructure for secure and scalable futuristic solutions for
enterprise clients. This will not just establish standardization of privacy norms but also allow
the digital marketing ecosystem to address trust, transparency, and convenience at an
enterprise level. This will also enable the stakeholders to focus on their individual IP and not
administration, thereby creating an efficient and liquid marketplace for all.
Aqilliz is set up with an overarching vision to facilitate a frictionless digital platform
economy where authentic value is discovered is through the principles of privacy,
provenance and personalisation.

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Introducing Aqilliz
Aqilliz is a software technology company. We specialize in distributed ledger technology and
its application in marketing.

Aqilliz is driven by the vision of enabling a decentralised platform economy that mutually
benefits brands, platforms, and consumers, underscored by trust, transparency, and
convenience. With a suite of technologies across Blockchain scalability, Differential Privacy &
Federated Discovery, Aqilliz is building a proprietary technology stack, Atom® that integrates all
the marketing and advertising technologies, thereby reducing complexity, simplifying the
processes and improving the efficiency of marketing investments. This is our unique selling
proposition.

Our mission is in creating a meaningful value exchange between brands, platforms and
consumers in the rapidly growing digital platform economy, Aqilliz provides technology
solutions that transform processes, secure privacy of data, remove fraud and engineer
valued outcomes.

We are building, the first of its kind, state-of-the-art distributed computing architecture, Atom,
to address all these needs. Atom is a hybrid blockchain that combines the security and
scalability of a private blockchain with accountability and decentralization from the public
blockchain. We leverage the very many components of the distributed ledger technology
across cryptography, smart contracting and consensus protocol with differential privacy and
federated learning to create a trusted execution environment.
At a foundational level, Atom is capable of ingesting multiple data streams from any taxonomy
where wide range of services across reconciliation, analytics and learning can be performed at
optimal speed with concurrency. We broadly classify them as authentication services. These
authentication services provide the much needed privacy and personalization capabilities in a
unified manner for the entire ecosystem. We provide this service on a permissioned ledger for
any specific federation.

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Aquila is our private permissioned blockchain network – a proprietary product being developed
by Aqilliz. Every participant is able to run a blockchain node connected to this network which
stores the shared ledger of data between participants. Smart contracts containing the business
rules for reconciliation of campaign data are also stored on this permissioned blockchain.
Examples of campaign data stored on this shared ledger include – campaign budget utilisation,
payment tokens, viewability rates, incremental impressions etc. Aquila will provide scalability
and security for campaign data participants, ensuring that sensitive campaign information such
as commercial terms are not exposed to participants. Aqilliz is currently actively developing
privacy channels that will allow partial state replication within the consortium.

Zilliqa is our high throughput public blockchain partner. Online interactions flow across the digital
platform economy exchanging value between content, commerce and communication. Unlike
physical assets, digital assets have the challenge of double spending – intentional and
unintentional – leading to fraudulent claims and fake information. Provenance is the much
needed requirement when online interactions are transferred for physical assets in the form of
payment, settlement or rewards. We classify them as authorization services. We provide these
services on a public blockchain for higher accountability and efficiency. Zilliqa is our strategic
partner in providing the high throughput public blockchain platform. Zilliqa went live in January,
2019 and now has a thriving ecosystem across finance, gaming and entertainment.

As an integrated architecture, Atom®, provides a customized hybrid blockchain for the digital
platform economy with security, scalability, accountability and decentralization.

Zilliqa Ethereum Bitcoin

Smart Contracts Yes Yes No
Smart contracts Smart contracts
written in Scilla written in Solidity
Throughput Per Second (TPS) Up to 1,000 15-30 7
Block Confirmation 43 seconds 193 seconds 1 4,200 seconds2
Transaction Cost3 << $0.01 per $0.10 to $0.53 per $6.67 per
transaction transaction transaction
Technology
Network Scalability Yes, by Sharding No No
Interoperability with other Atomic Swaps and Atomic Swaps and Atomic Swaps and
public chains Cosmos Peg Substrate Substrate
Smart contract formal Yes No Not Applicable
verification

1
Ethereum block confirmation time is approximately 13 seconds. However, due to the nature of the consensus protocol, 15
block confirmations will be required to confirm a transaction as confirmation is a probabilistic guarantee
2
Bitcoin block confirmation has a media confirmation time of 10.67 minutes, and 7 block confirmations are required to mark the
transaction as confirmed
3
Transaction cost varies by gas price and current cryptocurrency price. Cost is accurate as of 20 May 2020.

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Aqilliz Value Proposition
At the heart of Aqilliz’s solutions is to look at the internet as an inter-connected network that
constantly exchanges value instead of just being an information super highway. The world wide
web now holds more than just the information. As the platform economy spreads to dis-
intermediate businesses, from travel, tourism, media, entertainment to banking, record keeping
and communities, internet now is the place where many things are traded for many other things
with and without a fiat currency.

The evolution of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) stands testimony to this trend. Internet
is now at the point of inflection, as it evolves into an online space where individuals can
instantly transfer (monetary or social) value between each other, negating the need for
middleman and eliminating all third-party costs. With Internet of Things, this is only going to
massively accelerate.
Digital interactions are increasing across multiple devices. Offline to online integrations at one
end and real time interactions at the other end are driving different technologies to co-exist.
This is leading to a crowded market place, while in reality consumers are expecting a seamless
integrated experience. Campaign design, segmentation, messaging, ad delivery and reporting,
as specific activities are becoming individual comfort zones, which is why everything is
separate today.

As much as 20-25% of the marketing budget is being spent towards technologies that are
automating all these activities. Integrating customer data to provide a unified and personalized
consumer experience is the most powerful differentiator in marketing today and for the
foreseeable future. Forrester Research, in their August 2017 report highlighted that Martech
and Adtech convergence is inevitable. We believe it will happen, but in phases driven by two
specific market forces.

1. Continued drive for efficiencies means the cost of technology in marketing will not
significantly grow the current share of 25% any further and will push for mergers
and acquisitions across mutually complimentary partners

2. Regulatory requirements on getting and using customer data with consent and
provenance will make a few existing technologies redundant and push to trial
alternatives both on quality and scalability.

Key features of the Aqilliz Value Proposition:

1. Converge the fragmented tech ecosystem, unifying the digital media landscape for
the benefit of all stakeholders in the ecosystem

2. Resolve the existing asymmetry in the value being exchanged between brands,
platforms and consumers thereby unlocking value.

3. Facilitate this new digital platform economy underscored by trust, transparency,

and convenience, to the benefit of all stakeholders

4. Incentivise participation through strategic partnerships in advertising, media,

marketing, technology, data and analytics

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Our understanding and interactions with the marketing ecosystem, highlights three important
areas where our hybrid architecture, Atom®, can prove to be immensely beneficial.
1. At the basic level, asset provenance in the form of impression trail optimization provides
significant return on investment on activation. Emergence of digital currencies is
opening the market up for electronic, peer-to-peer and universally accessible
currencies above and beyond the central bank issued ones

2. At a transactional level, a convenient system of reconciliation for dynamic settlement

of rewards, loyalty programs or consumer engagement provides a huge opportunity.
Internet is now getting ready for privacy of design

3. At a strategic level, resolution of identities in a private and compliant manner,

significantly improves targeting, re-targeting and personalization with reduced
wastage. Identity resolution also provides the much needed consent and provenance
management for the federation partners.

Atom aims to configure its overall architecture in providing these three solutions customized
for the marketing industry across consumer activation, rewards management and identity
resolution. Our philosophy is to look at this as to Who, What, How, When and Where the
value is exchanged and introduce methods to optimise the current business model with an aim
to unlock value for everybody in the digital economy. With a keen understanding of all the
participants in the value chain, Aqilliz will actively collaborate with various partners in the
advertising, data, marketing, technology, and analytics industries to build three specific
bespoke solutions:

• Proton, to provide the administrative layer not just to reconcile but to provide
source attestation, transaction verification and dispute resolution across the supply
chain. Proton focusses on How the value is exchanged, when and where.

• Neutron, to enable a federated data marketplace, securing the identities by

verifying and authenticating the identities of all transacting parties, through
establishing provenance. Neutron focusses on who is exchanging what value

• Electron, to address settlements, specifically in risk mitigation, cost reduction, and

improved customer outcomes. Electron focusses on Faster, Cheaper and Secure
settlement of any online value (eg., loyalty points) by providing increased liquidity.

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A careful look at current trends and across 8000+ companies across 40 different technologies
highlights three broad themes, as their actions in response to the current market requirements:
1. Companies are sinking more monies in integrating their already acquired companies
increasing the cost of the operations and deployment timelines

2. Niche players with excellent customer satisfaction scores on the back of quality
products are not able to diversify to other channels

3. Interoperability in technology continues to restrict adoption both within their own

internal version upgrades and integration with other technologies outside.

Aqilliz is entering this market, without any baggage of mergers, acquisition or legacy
technologies; with an all new fresh approach, leveraging the power of distributed ledger
technology and its related tools across cryptography and secure analytics. Aqilliz has built a
proprietary technology stack that seamlessly integrates Martech tools with Adtech enabling
safe and secure usage of data across both of them for a seamless customer experience at
affordable cost and increased effectiveness. Aqilliz provides Privacy, Provenance and
Personalisation converging the various tools across customer segmentation and audience
delivery.

Aqilliz’ value proposition is designed to address these weaknesses in the market. At the same
time it takes cognizance of the market forces at play. Large enterprises will invest in new
technologies with a long runway to stay relevant. Regulatory forces will force niche players to
invest in new technologies at the expense of their existing cash flow to remain relevant. Our
value proposition, therefore, is built across four strategic waves, running in parallel but feeding
into each other.

1. Proof of technology built with invitation pricing and rapid operational efficiencies
sufficient enough to provide positive cashflow in the short-term

2. Sustainable business model that enables system lock-in through migration of

different solutions across the Martech and Adtech ecosystem

3. Strong innovation pipeline that continues to provide new and emerging technologies
that highlights our product leadership

4. Strong customer management plan that acquires, retains and profitably grow the
segment share and help diversify the account share.

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Creating sustainable stakeholder value
Aqilliz was set up 9 months ago as a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry
with a suite of tools to solve the existing challenges across supply chain transparency, identity
resolution and settlement of rewards and loyalty programs. We have received positive
feedback from the market to our products with some recommendations to finetune. During
the course of these 6 months, we have listened to the market and sharpened our proposition.

Our go to market strategy now reflects the following:

• We have widened our scope in providing supply chain transparency to not just
programmatic digital but also to include Digital Out-of-Home, Connected TV and
Linear TV, with a potential to provide integrated omni-channel settlement.

• Market forces eliminating third-party cookies from all the browsers made us rethink
our identity resolution product to integrate emerging and new technologies like
differential privacy and federated learning for the open garden.

• We have an opportunity to widen the scope to look beyond loyalty programs and
to address the overall personalization category through fan management in sports
and rewarded viewership in content, particularly in the OTT segment.

Aqilliz will take an active part in the industry representing measurement, technology,
regulation, marketing and advertising; generating blogposts, thought leadership articles and
insights—with the aim to provide knowledge to new entrants of the industry, as well as to
shape mindsets and create conversations with industry leaders. We also actively engage key
stakeholders to create training programs to educate the ecosystem on this technology. We will
also work with other government organisations in promoting inter-operability and joint
industry initiatives to enable adoption. Knowledge that exists within Aqilliz in the form of
patents, copyrights, sector experience, technologies, systems, framework, architecture and
processes will all be directed towards one single objective – satisfying the customer need – i.e.,
to converge Martech tools with Adtech on the back of the underlying data that provides
seamless consumer experience. We approach this across three key strategic initiatives:

1. Our strategic competencies to satisfy the customer need, fundamentally, is in the

sphere of technology for marketing. We will continue to invest ahead of the curve
to address both productivity and growth waves. The dimensions of technology will
address the emerging distributed ledger technology but also cover the related fields
of analytics, differential privacy, federated learning, recommendation engines,
complex event processing and interest graphs

2. We will actively nurture a focused and complimentary partner ecosystem that helps
us to build our competencies and also keep us abreast of related technological
advancements particularly in the spheres of cloud computing, data storage and data
transfer. Industry bodies connected to the marketing and advertising ecosystem are
also part of this Information competencies.

3. Worldwide developments relating to the society in terms of working culture,

teamwork, collaboration, information sharing, agreements, culture and leadership
are forcing for a major change. We will actively pursue all the latest technologies
that enables effective remote working culture without compromising on quality and
capabilities. We take this as an opportunity to promote diversity in our talent mix
as well.

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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the problem Aqilliz is trying to solve? How have we validated the need? Why this led
us to build this product in the first place? How do we know our users want and need it? Have
we tested and validated the idea with real people?

As of 2020, an estimated 8000+ companies with 40 different technologies are operating on this
platform spending nearly $120 Bn, making it one of the most crowded, inefficient and disjointed
infrastructure for any industry in the world, today. Despite more companies entering the platform,
this economy is still grappling to address fundamental issues on privacy, provenance and
personalisation. As a platform, digital marketing economy deals with digital asset exchanges, sharing
of personally identifiable information and real time data analytics, at scale and speed. There is also
the added concern of storing sensitive information in a shared ledger beyond the needed scope, that
impedes the adoption of distributed ledger technology in marketing.

Aqilliz is a software technology company built for marketing that aims to converge the fragmented
AdTech, Data & MarTech Ecosystem and help solve the privacy, provenance and personalisation
challenges. We are building, the first of its kind, state-of-the-art distributed computing architecture,
Atom, to address all these needs. We have validated the need for asset provenance, identity
resolution and dynamic settlement of rewards; and have built use cases for these in the form of
Proton, Neutron and Electron. The need is latent, and it needs to be highlighted with business
benefits. We have already run pilots for Proton that have delivered a minimum of 16% efficiency
uplift. We are now testing Neutron and Electron with businesses.
Who is going to buy your product? What do we know about them? And how does our strategy
support them? Who exactly is our customer? Who are our target markets? How big are they?
What is their make up?

Enterprise clients are our key buyers. They are typically leading the marketing function in conjunction
with the technology teams. Sales teams from various platform owners and in some cases, the end
consumers are also our clients. Our strategy is to develop a hybrid blockchain, Atom, that aims to
help resolve Identities with Neutron through a Federated Identity Management platform, Activate
with Proton through an Inflight Campaign Optimisation platform, and Reward with Electron through
a Dynamic Value Settlement platform. This will unlock marketing investments for superior
personalisation, better ROI and quicker rewards redemption.

Who else is in the market? How are they going to react to our arrival into the market? How
adaptive is our strategy to go to the market? What is our market understanding? What market
trends are happening and in the horizon that will affect the launch?

There are more than 150+ applications in the market trying to provide blockchain solutions for the
marketing industry. However, they are still providing point solutions for individual problems but not
addressing the need holistically. Since, we are still in the “hype curve” there is more acceptance but
soon, the investments will dry up in the absence of commercial returns. Our strategy is to remain
open-sourced and collaborative in the marketplace with the fastest go-to-market plan with like-
minded partners coming together. We believe we have a narrow window of the next 24 months to
go to market to capitalise on the first mover advantage in this field. GDPR/CCPA led privacy
compliance norms will open up more opportunities for the publishers to move away from Google and
Facebook who currently dominate the digital advertising dollars. This is the opportunity to build a
viable alternative.

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How and where will you distribute your product? When customers are interested in buying it
from you, how will you make it happen? Is it on your website? Is it a software product that
they download directly from you? Is there an after-sales service component?

Our product development team along with the engineering and business partnership team is head-
quartered in Singapore. However, we believe the business rests in the markets. Our initial focus is
within the AMENA region, but we will NOT say no to projects in the US or Europe; and we are already
working with strategic partners to go to market in these regions with a specific focus on US, UK and
Germany. When customers are interested in buying our solutions, it will be serviced as “Software as
A Service”. While the technology component will be powered by our partner, Zilliqa, we will license
the software for basic applications, and we will also look to embed our talent within our client
organisation for not only after sales service but also to provide custom-built applications.
The more marketing muscle you flex the less sales you will need and vice versa. How much
selling do you need to do? Is the market attention seeking? Is the product complex?
Individuals vs companies? Need for relationships? Sales vs Marketing strategy?

Initially we will need a heavy effort in selling these solutions as the technology itself is in its nascent
stage. Market requires a lot of attention and follow through, as the need is latent, but is imminent.
We will have to walk with the market to highlight the challenges to extract opportunities. While the
software might not be complex, the technology requires a challenge in the status quo and
reorientation. While the decision to invest in this is a corporate decision, we need to advocate the
individuals in the organisation to carry this through. Personal relationship is very important as we
need to build a trusted advisor engagement with the corporates. We will need a strong sales team in
the market as much as a central marketing function.
What is your Value Proposition? What makes you different from the competition? Why
would someone choose to buy you over what’s already available? For example, you integrate
with more tools they already use, or you have an adaptable version?

Aqilliz is the only company in the industry created with a strong connection with the high throughput
blockchain platform, Zilliqa. As an innovator and an early stage entrant into the nascent category,
the umbilical cord with Zilliqa gives Aqilliz a unique advantage to leverage the technology in full and
equally, will be able to go back to the platform for adaptation faster than others. As an application
layer, our solutions are designed to be modular and can be easily integrated to any enterprise-grade
systems. Enterprise clients NEED NOT make any additional investments or changes to their existing
technology. Aqilliz provides a convergent layer on top of the existing stack and provides
opportunities to optimize the same.
Where does your product fit in the market? How do you want people to view you in relation
to other products out there? What is your Positioning?

Aqilliz is positioned as a software technology company—we specialise in distributed ledger

technology and its application in the marketing industry. Within this fragmented marketing
ecosystem, harmonisation, consensus and collaboration is required as the industry deals with digital
asset exchanges, sharing of personally identifiable information and real-time data analytics, at scale
and speed. Our unique preposition includes the provision of a scaled up distributed ledger
technology, differential privacy with secure analytics and federated discovery with provenance.
These solutions are highly customised for the marketing industry across identity resolution,
consumer activation and rewards management, all at one stop.

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How do you talk about the value you create? It’s enough to just pick 3 pain points you solve
for users or benefits you provide. What is your messaging plans?
At Aqilliz, our vision is to create a frictionless digital marketing economy where authentic value is
discovered through the principles of privacy, provenance and personalisation. Our understanding
and interactions with the marketing ecosystem, highlights three important areas where our solutions
can prove to be immensely beneficial to the industry—tied to these core principles. At the basic level,
asset provenance in the form of impression trail optimisation provides significant return on
investment on activation. Emergence of digital currencies is opening up market for electronic, peer-
to-peer and universally accessible currencies above and beyond the central bank issued ones. At a
transactional level, a convenient system of reconciliation for dynamic settlement of rewards, loyalty
programs or consumer engagement provides a huge opportunity. Internet is now getting ready for
privacy of design. Resolution of identities in a private and compliant manner, significantly improves
targeting, re-targeting and personalisation with reduced wastage.

Furthermore, The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) has also released a report
recently reinforcing the need for marketers to address issues on lack of trust, transparency,
standardisation and verification in programmatic advertising. With major distribution channels,
spanning from OTT to Out-of-Home, turning to programmatic, marketers will have to employ a
holistic approach from start-to-end of campaign in order to gain maximum value out of
programmatic advertising. That said, they can’t afford to have yet another point solution—and here
we are, at Aqilliz, offering a one-stop solution to optimise the programmatic advertising supply chain,
enabling efficiency uplifts in their campaigns.
What is necessary to support and sell the product? What resources, tools, and support do you
need? What are your sales and support materials?

We will need founder clients to participate and partner with us in creating the proof of concept and
use cases, and we’ve made significant strides since the start of the year. We have announced
partnerships with established brand names and industry leaders in the past months and working
closely with them on pilot campaigns thereafter. A strong product development team is essential to
rapidly convert these Proof of Concepts to products, and our product team is growing steadily to
support our development to enterprise-grade solutions. We will also need to work with a wide range
of stakeholders across technology, governance, compliance to influence the outcomes. Regulators
are key as well. Sales team will need a strong follow through support in terms of credentials, product
and industry standing.

How many stages are there in your customer’s buying journey and what are the behaviours
they take before and after purchasing? How much should people already know about you
when they engage with the product?

This follows a typical B2B purchase cycle. Evidence indicates that from the willingness to try proof
of concept to actual purchase, there is only a 10% conversion. So, we will need more enterprises to
trial our product. And even after conversion, there is a good chance that this might remain niche in
its adoption within an enterprise, before it takes wider adoption across the organisation. Constant
follow through and sustained innovation is key. Familiarity helps a lot in getting the first foot in the
door, however after that the after sales service. Our product must stand true to its potential.
Category education is key. We will also need to build a strong educational program within our
Enterprise Client organisation for adoption. Aqilliz is soon planning for a Distributed Ledger
Certification Program for the client teams.

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Who uses your product? What are their specific characteristics and behaviours? Try to narrow
this down to 1 or 2 user personas and get specific.

This is a very complex ecosystem. While the decision maker is the CMO or the CEO of the
organisation to adopt blockchain/DLT in the organisation, it has the danger of quickly being
relegated to the end user, who is typically a brand manager, agency personnel or sales manager who
will eventually be using this application. Equally, if the CMO is the influencer, typically the CTO is
required to influence the influencer as this involves technology level CAPEX discussions that might
come in the way. Although we have identified CMO as the primary target audience, we will still need
two tracks to engage in a client organisation. This is a slow burn and requires resilience in being at
the job. One careful step even at the closing stage can render the entire effort useless.

How will those people use the product? How can you help them imagine a life that’s better
because they’re a customer of yours?

All Aqilliz products are software applications that runs on the internet. It can be a single user or a
multiuser version. We will need to create a compelling “What is in it for me?” at a personal level for
the end user to be totally motivated. Equally for the CMO and the CEO, it is the financial benefit
along with the industry recognition – to be seen as an “Innovator” – that is important. Which is why
personal relationships being as much key as the business benefits.
Who are you? What promises do you make as a company, both through the language you use
to describe yourself and the way you present yourself visually? If you already have a strong
and well-established brand for your company, is this new product consistent with it?

Aqilliz as the name suggests has two inherent benefits/messages and we will leverage both. One is,
it is spelt Zilliqa in reverse and in that it highlights our strong connection to the blockchain platform.
It is also positioned as to solve the “Achilles heel” of current digital platform economy, one that is
grappling to address fundamental issues on trust, transparency and convenience. We want to enable
businesses to mitigate these challenges by transforming processes, securing privacy of data, and
activating their audiences efficiently, thereby enhance their overall marketing return on investment.
Our language will be that of a “trusted enabler” with strong “source credibility” backed by positive
results derived from campaigns run with established industry brand names.
How are you going to find people to become customers? What are the many different ways
to find leads and generate demand for your product?

Lead generation comes from existing network and the ability to penetrate into new audiences and
identifying the challenges that we aim to solve for them. Education plays a vital role in
communicating these challenges, how do they impact our potential clients and how we can add value
to their businesses. The narrative needs to also highlight the need to be adaptable and try new things.
All these need to be done in a personal/customised manner. Generic credentials will not work.

What value are you creating for users outside of the product? What is your value creation?

Content is a powerful way to get in front of potential customers and show them that we are
knowledgeable and trustworthy. Our content strategy will help support our launch with blog posts,
videos, eBooks, and whitepapers. Aqilliz will take an active part in the industry representing
measurement, technology, regulation, marketing and advertising. We have been generating content
such as blogposts, thought leadership articles and insights—with the aim to provide fundamental
knowledge to new entrants of the industry, as well as to shape mindsets and create conversations
with industry leaders. We also actively engage key stakeholders to create training programs to
educate the ecosystem on this technology. We will also work with other government organisations
in promoting inter-operability and joint industry initiatives to enable adoption.

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Where will the main information about your new product live? Will it be on your main site or
on a micro-site? How will you explain your value quickly and in a compelling enough way to
get people to purchase?
Aqilliz website will be the primary source of information. We will also use commercial LinkedIn and
Twitter handles to constantly communicate our progress and upgrades. All promotions and
communication will always link back to our official website: www. aqilliz.com.

Events, ads, and PR: What else can you do to get people interested?
We have identified AdTech and MarTech events to engage with the marketing industry. Unforeseen
pandemic has changed our plans thoroughly. We have pivoted to online webinars to discuss industry
issues, share insights and learnings, to stay connected with our partners and clients. We are also an
official member of Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and IAB SEA+India—by leveraging the
network of these industry authorities, our solutions can be amplified to relevant audiences. Joining
specific committees, such as the Rearc Task Force (by IAB Tech Lab) has also put us in the forefront
of the industry as we set benchmarks and explore viable solutions to enable better balance of privacy
and personalisation.

How are your sales team going to find, engage with, and sell to potential customers? What
tools are they going to use for managing relationships and demoing the product? Are they in
loop with the latest trends and other key marketing channels your customers are active on?
We will have prototypes built for Atom that demonstrates the three use cases with declared
credentials. It will be a series of audio-visual demonstrations as well as practical on-site demos that
helps the prospective consumer to feel convinced about the product. We need to equally sell the
overall distributed ledger technology as much as our product. Sales team need to be trained on our
product suite and equally about the Zilliqa platform that highlights scale, security and affordability.

What’s the right approach for finding clients? Inbound sales? Outbound sales? Cold calling?
Resellers and partners?
The right approach is to have a few founder partners who trusts us and are willing to walk with us in
this journey. First priority is to identity these partners. Aqilliz will be offering preferential commercial
terms on a long-term basis to incentivise them. This in itself is a big agenda and strategy. We will
also approach the other end of the spectrum through long tail partners who are seeking efficiency,
transparency and affordability in their technological investments through our self-serve model.

How are you going to train the sales team so they’re knowledgeable enough and confident in
selling the product?

While some of the basics on the technology will be trained and onboarded to the sales team (this is
an incentive for them to join Aqilliz), there will be a structured approach to train them and evaluate
them on their levels of engagement with the client organisation. This is an important and critical
component of employee hiring and retention.

Do you have a CRM or some other tool you already use and are familiar with? Will support be
done in real-time or over email?
Support to the clients will be done in two forms. For larger founder partner clients, Aqilliz strategy is
to embed a talent within their organisation to ensure that everything is running as per the plan. For
the long tail clients, support will be provided through email clarifications. We are eventually planning
for an AI/Chatbot kind of support system.

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How will new users know how to use your product? Do you have an onboarding or training
series ready for them?
We will have a trained executive leading the onboarding and training series ready for support. For
large scale enterprises, we will be providing a dedicated help desk and a project lead for 24x7
support.

How will you make sure people stick around? Or identify and nurture people who look like
they’re going to leave? What are your retention strategies?
Our fundamental approach is to continuously rotate the talent across projects of considerable
momentum, so that they do not loose heart with their efforts. Codification of the processes and their
efforts in meeting even small milestones is critical. We will celebrate every single progress we make,
every week. However, little it is. All established products and solutions will have a customized
playbook for future reference and upgrades.

Satisfaction measurement: What will tell you that you’re successful? (repeat usage, NPS
scores, upgrades)

There are three measures for satisfaction. At a fundamental level and purely internal, adoption of
the Zilliqa platform for the application of our products is our fundamental measure. Externally, we
have three stakeholders - brands, platforms and consumers. However, as a B2B organisation, we will
institute a Client Referral Rating mechanism that provides us quarterly feedback on our progress and
also a score on a 10 points scale that rates our relationship as worthy of advocacy or not.

How easy it is for people to use your product? Is it the kind of product that someone can
sign up and start using without needing dedicated training? Do we need to employ a sales-
based or channel strategy as you’ll need people to train your customers?

Our objective is to make the technology ubiquitous for the end user and leave the technical
configuration to the senior stakeholders to align and deploy. At a foundational level, Atom is capable
of ingesting multiple data streams from any taxonomy where wide range of services across
reconciliation, analytics and learning can be performed at optimal speed with concurrency. That
said, a set of layered training is required in the client organisation for adoption and expansion. Cost
towards training will be baked into the service fee and it will be carefully calibrated for different
clients depending upon their relationship with Aqilliz.

Does the product have the necessary features and capabilities to serve the Enterprise? What
about the appropriate security certificates and practices?

Yes. Aqilliz will have the highest level of Enterprise grade security features. We leverage the very
many components of the distributed ledger technology across cryptography, smart contracting and
consensus protocol with differential privacy and federated learning in creating a trusted execution
environment in this architecture. Authentication services provide the privacy and personalization
capabilities in a unified manner for the entire ecosystem. Unlike physical assets, digital assets have
the challenge of double spending – intentional and unintentional – leading to fraudulent claims and
fake information. Provenance is required when online interactions are transferred for physical assets
in the form of payment, settlement or rewards.

How do users typically adopt our product? Is it the kind of product where one employee starts
using it, sees the value, and adoption organically expands out?

Aqilliz’s strategy will be to have an organic expansion within the organisation. However, it needs to
be sold top down first and then create enablers for application, bottom up. As explained earlier, we
will have a two-pronged strategy - founder clients who are willing to walk with us in this journey and
Long tail partners to whom we will market Aqilliz as a self-service model.

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