New Delhi, Jul 4 (IANS): India outranks every other country in the world in terms of preference on dealing with brands and the secular shift to digital has gone to the next level in the country in the post-Covid world, a top Adobe executive said on Monday.

According to Simon Tate, Adobe's Asia Pacific President, it really has been amazing to see how quickly their customers in India have made that shift to having a very strong, personalised content-driven outreach through digital channels with their customers, "not just current customers but prospective ones as well".

"The Indian companies have an opportunity to really get on the front foot with this broad theme of digital experience. But if they get on the front foot with some of the new emerging technologies around virtual reality, Web3.0, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), metaverse, then the next few years are going to be really exciting," Tate told IANS.

"Personalisation at scale in a digital-first world is what every marketer that I talk to and every executive frankly wants to achieve," added Tate, a 20 year IT veteran with rich experience across a variety of business development and leadership roles in Asia Pacific.

If you draw a triangle between Mumbai, Taipei and Auckland, you would also have at least two-third of the world's businesses.

"Many of those businesses are not just domestically focused, they are internationally focused. Those businesses have had to make a huge pivot to digital. We all now live in a digital-first economy that is worth about $4 trillion a year," Tate emphasised.

Tate sees Web3.0, virtual reality, NFTs and metaverse as top defining technology trends for the near future.

"The one that I think interests me the most is the metaverse because it takes digital experience to the next level, where the experience that you and I as consumers might have with a brand will be deeply immersive," Tate told IANS.

A third of the business leaders in India say that they know and understand what expectations the consumers have of them in terms of digital experience — and data trust is one of the biggest factors.

"There needs to be a recognition on behalf of business leaders that they need to be completely open and transparent about what first party data they are collecting," Tate said.

The consumers now need to understand what is being collected firstly and secondly of what has been collected, how has that data been used to benefit their experience — not an aggregate experience but their own individual personalised experience.

"To really kick-start your digital experience offering, you can't do it with third-party data anymore. It has to be first-party data which is accurate and easily personalised," said the Adobe executive.

"You don't need to achieve digital utopia; all you need to do is know where that first-party data is," he stressed.