**Jonathan:** Hey, Rashi. Thanks for joining.
**Raashee:** Hey, Jideh. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
**Jonathan:** Oh, of course, I have been. I've been really looking forward to talking to you. I know you have, you've been at the FTC. You help marketers. You advise a lot on privacy. I'm really keen to get your thoughts on kind of what the FTC is doing, maybe some inside of baseball. But before we get to that, tell us tell us a little bit about you.
**Raashee:** Yeah. So I think you touched it. So I sort of live in the intersection of marketing, advertising, and privacy, and just my journey has been sort of very nonlinear. I started in the, brand side of the, industry. So I used to work at Samsung and did did some work and, Samsung and VW is where I started, like, the brand work. And I did all of the media and advertising and social for them. Then I spent, a lot of time in the agency world, group and publicist shops, and also a couple independent shops. So that's where I say the rubber meets the road. You get your hands dirty. You see what happens on the front end and the back end. And then I did, have a small stint on the ad tech side at Neustar, which is obviously now TransUnion. So I got to see a little bit of, like, how these products are being made, that are how personalization is powered by data, how sort of audience profiling happens, and all that all of that stuff. And through this journey, I got an opportunity to go to FTC. So I was appointed as the White House presidential innovation fellow, and I was, asked to help FTC really at the intersection of advertising and privacy as they were trying to sort of understand the industry better, understand sort of, like, what goes on the back end, who are the players, what happens with the data, all of the usual stuff that we take for granted. I helped with enforcement, rulemaking, six p research. So, did get a really good view into how they think about different issues and things. And, and now, I am, as you said, I am sort of working in the industry back in the industry and helping companies more from a both both at advertising marketing front and also privacy front.
**Jonathan:** Rashi, it's it's so amazing. Like, it's like, the intersection between those two, I just never seen anything like it. Like, it's just so important right now. So I wanted to ask you, like I mean, of course, the FTC, they're out there with, a position on targeted advertising. Right? That it's surveillance capitalism. You kinda hear that word thrown around. So that that tells you how they're thinking about it a little bit. And what I wanted to ask you is, you know, from a marketer's perspective, especially, right, which which you've been across our business and been behind some of the inner workings of how how AdTech works. How how would the FTC approach something like that? Like, they're passionate about targeted advertising. They think it's surveillance capitalism. What happens next? Is there some kind of framework that they follow?
**Raashee:** Yeah. So it's actually very interesting that you asked that question because when I started working there, I was trying to get my footing because I was like, I'm a marketer. What am I doing in a regulatory environment? And I am not an attorney. Like, how do I connect the dots, and how do I be useful? So I sort of brought a page with me from the marketer's playbook where how marketers approach things is we're very much looking at, like, a funnel. Who are we trying to reach? Who is your audience? How are we gonna find them? What data did they what data do we need about them to really target them, effectively and efficiently? And how are the different sort of tools and products that are out there available for us to make that happen. And I saw a very similar, sort of notion that I feel how FTC operates, at least how I approached my work at FTC, was really looking at, a big picture of, like, what are the different types of data that are causing consumer harm? What are the different areas that are being exploited and the harms that come out of it? So number one, types of data, like location, health, sensitive data. Second is how is the data collected? So, again, this data is out there. It's being used, but we need to then get a step further down to understand what are the different practices that companies are employing to capture this data. Is it cookies? Obviously, cookies have been, a problem for a while for a while, and they still are a problem because they're not gonna wait yet. And, what is the next thing? Pixels, tags, other there are a lot of other newer innovative technologies that companies are starting to find, whether it's, power data being anonymized. So, yes, you're collecting sensitive data and but then they are employing ways to anonymize data to make some of the business practices possible. So hashing comes to mind. And then third is any regulator, FTC or anybody, the companies out there are doing a lot of different things. Some are right by the book and some are not, and they want to, enforce their authorities and help the consumers. Right? So that's where enforcement comes in. But to me, enforcement by itself is a vacamole approach. You can only go so far and you can only put to task so many companies. It's just there's this limit to how many people or how many companies you can, approach and and, take action on. So they really need to go upstream. So that was the third thing I found was a desire and effort to go upstream so that there's change in the ecosystem. You're not sort of, like, doing onesies, twosies. You are actually trying to make a change that is broader, bigger, and has a ripple effect in the in the industry. So that's where, for example, data brokers come into play.
**Jonathan:** Yes. Oh, it's I love that framework. So type of data, data collection practices, and then upstream, find some, like, piece of the machine, some cognitive machine that that's critical to it and really kinda dig in.
