The Naytra project is the first step to making the Naytra paradigm a reality.

This body of work involves establishing the foundation to shift the prediction of relevance from the realm of brands to the realm of the individual consumer. And making this shift brings opportunities for the creation of new businesses and business models.

We will look at four key challenges that will need to be tackled head-on by the Naytra project.

A new system of value exchange

Digital marketing today is a transaction where a brand offers value to a consumer with information (or an experience) and the consumer returns value with their engagement, which could eventually lead to economic value for the brand.

The Naytra paradigm changes this because the consumer (with their Naytra) now becomes part of the process of a brand determining whether their message is of value to the consumer.

Let’s take a deeper look with an example of how value is exchanged in the programmatic digital advertising world today.

How would this value exchange work with the Naytra project?

Obtaining relevance predictions directly from consumers’ Naytra’s would help advertisers filter out Ads to the wrong person, sent at wrong time, or with the wrong message. This could heavily reduce the number of Ads flowing through ad networks. But what could this value exchange look like?

It also brings up other important questions / considerations:

• If relevance prediction is a service, who pays for it? The consumer, the brand or some other entity? If it’s some other entity, then who could be that entity?
• A consumer’s Naytra will get bombarded with requests from brands wanting to get better relevance prediction to their Ads. There is a technology cost associated to serving those requests. Who would bear that cost?

Perhaps the win-win here could be that Ad Networks host the consumers’ nétra models. Ad- networks are already built to scale to massive volumes of traffic, and they could leverage their infrastructure to be the “relevance brokers” between brands and consumer Naytra models. And the exchange for that value would be continued traffic through the Ad Network.

Another question also arises:

Relevance might play such an important part in the overall advertising transaction that we could think of it being factored into value across all parties involved. Value exchange across parties could be measured and compensated in a way that is associated with relevance. And the Blockchain technology could help enable this.

There could be many other big questions to answer. But in my view, with the Naytra project, the economics of digital advertising will completely change, creating new business models and systems of value exchange. The Naytra project will play a central role in dealing with these challenges and solutions.

A place for your digital exhaust

A consumer’s Naytra model learns from their digital exhaust. But where will that digital exhaust live? Will it be stored behind the walls of data monopolies such as Amazon and Google?

What if your digital exhaust could be encrypted and distributed across hundreds of nodes across peer-to-peer networks but still have the ability to be requested on demand?

Technology such as this is already here and is also based on Blockchain.

As we saw earlier, most of the Naytra model generation happens in the offline layer. So, in my view the lags associated with this approach are a worthy tradeoff to a more democratic storage of a consumer’s digital exhaust.

Ultimately the choice of where their digital exhaust lives should be made by the consumer so multiple mechanisms should be explored and enabled by the Naytra project.

The end of data monopolies

Earlier I talked about data fragmentation across platforms, publishers and brands. Today, some platforms have more data about consumers than others, and these platforms are trying to create virtual representations of consumers. While the virtual representations created by these data monopolies are filled with deep holes due to fragmentation, they still have a competitive advantage over many other corporations. Today, data monopolies are creating services using this intelligence to benefit consumers in areas such as context-aware computing.

With the Naytra project, a consumer’s Naytra will be able to surpass any level of individual consumer intelligence that a data monopoly has.

How this paradigm can be leveraged to create a powerful, symbiotic relationship with today’s data monopolies in order to benefit consumers, while safeguarding their privacy, is something that needs to be explored as part of the Naytra project.

Locating your Naytra

If we are to have brands connect to a consumer’s Naytra to communicate their message, then it needs to be addressable. In the current digital marketing world an email address or, through intermediate networks, a consumer’s device IP address is used for addressability. The Naytra project needs to have a name service (like a DNS) to lookup a consumer’s Naytra, similar to a DNS lookup that is accessible to the world.

All these considerations are just the beginning and there are clearly other big questions to address by the Naytra project such as:

• How will machine learning on encrypted data work with the Naytra architecture?
• What type of integration will Naytra have with bots and digital assistants of the future?
• Should people or corporations own the evolution of Naytra technology?
• How can the capabilities of Naytra be expanded beyond digital marketing?

How successful will the Naytra project be? This remains to be seen. But there is an opportunity for today’s marketing technologists and martech to show how this paradigm could become the backbone to the future of digital marketing.