Data in Marketing: The India Outlook

The Shock of 2025: Data Stops Being “Free”

In 2025, Indian marketing finally collided head‑on with a hard truth: data was no longer a free, limitless fuel; it had become a regulated, perishable and strategically scarce resource. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, combined with global privacy shifts and the deprecation of cookies, turned what had long been a background compliance concern into the centrepiece of marketing strategy.

From Data Hoarding to “What’s Worth Keeping?”

For years, brands had prided themselves on being “data‑driven”, hoarding every possible click, impression and email in sprawling martech stacks. Storage was cheap, regulations were fuzzy, and deletion was a theoretical concept. In 2025, that era ended. DPDP’s rules – from explicit consent to the three‑year deletion requirement for inactive users – forced marketers to confront a simple question: which data is worth the legal risk, cost and effort of keeping at all?

Data as a Perishable Product

The answer reshaped the industry. Data began to be treated like a perishable product whose value decays quickly once a customer’s need is fulfilled, with signals around a car purchase remaining meaningful only for a few months until the next purchase cycle, while a quick‑commerce basket loses its predictive power within minutes. In this new reality, the real winners were not those sitting on the most extensive databases, but those with the freshest and most consistently refreshed data – a position naturally favouring large ecosystems such as global platforms and major retail and telecom players. Even the much‑debated three‑year deletion rule, initially framed as a threat, quietly revealed its strategic upside, because in practice most brands already derived little value from users who had been inactive for that long and advanced CRM systems had long since deprioritised them, meaning the rule codified what good marketing hygiene should have been all along while forcing companies with poor discipline to clean their pipes

Behaviour vs Transaction: Not All Data Is Equal

Marketers also had to unlearn a comfortable myth: that all data is equally valid. The line between behavioural and transactional signals suddenly mattered. Searching for a luxury brand or liking an aspirational post no longer counted as enough; complex purchase data and high‑intent interactions became the gold standard. Every extra row stored now came bundled with obligations: security, audits, deletion workflows and potential penalties if anything went wrong. In that light, low‑quality data stopped being an asset and started to look like a liability.

Cookie Collapse and the First‑Party Fix

At the same time, the deprecation of cookies on the open web quietly rewired performance marketing. The legal and operational responsibility for privacy shifted from browsers and intermediaries directly onto advertisers and their partners. Targeting accuracy outside walled gardens declined, and the industry’s reflexive hope that “someone will fix it” gave way to a more sobering realisation: the only reliable fix was to own and govern high‑quality first‑party data.

The Rise of “Data Pockets” and Retail Media

This shift sparked the rise of “data pockets” – environments rich in consented, high‑intent signals where media buying suddenly became both more privacy‑safe and more effective. Retail media networks emerged as the sharp edge of this trend. Sitting at the intersection of intent, transaction and identity, they offered the precision that cookies once promised without the same regulatory fragility. In India, marketplaces and telecom‑plus‑media conglomerates quickly turned this advantage into tangible pricing power and strategic leverage.

Inside the Brand: A New Martech Agenda

Inside brands, the martech conversation changed tone. The race to bolt on yet another tool was replaced by a quieter, more demanding agenda: consent management, identity resolution, clean rooms, secure infrastructure and privacy‑by‑design workflows. What had once been a “legal problem” became a performance issue. Without trusted, well‑governed first‑party data, even the most innovative bidding algorithm had little to work with. With it, digital could evolve from a cheap reach engine into the core driver of outcome‑led growth.

Conclusion: Keep Less, Know More, Use Better

By the end of 2025, what had started as a compliance story had become a full‑blown strategic reset. Data had been dethroned as an unquestioned good and reinstalled as a tightly governed asset whose value depended on freshness, consent and context. Privacy, once seen as a brake on growth, began to look more like the scaffolding that held long‑term performance and trust together. The marketing revolution of 2025 was not about adding more dashboards or more AI – it was about finally learning to keep less, know more and use it better.