How One Creation is Empowering Brands and Consumers in a Cookie-less World: An Interview with CEO Zohar Hod

Zohar Hod, an experienced founder and CEO in the fintech space, saw firsthand the issues with how consumer data was being handled during a personal health crisis with his family. This inspired him to launch One Creation with the goal of putting consumers fully in control of their own data. Through the company’s progressive consent platform, brands are now able to request customer preferences and personalize engagements across touchpoints – all with the customer’s explicit and time-bound permissions.

As privacy regulations continue to tighten globally and third-party cookies disappear, One Creation is positioned to help brands navigate these changes. Their patented solution leverages cryptography and smart contracts to not only transparently collect zero-party data progressive consent, but also enforce the sharing rules for that data wherever it flows. In this interview with Entrepreneur Loop Editor Neha Mehra, Zohar Hod shares how they are addressing privacy challenges and personalizing experiences.

1. Please provide a brief introduction of yourself and your professional background.

Zohar Hod is a serial entrepreneur in the fintech industry with 5 startup involvements and two exits under his belt. His latest venture, One Creation, is in the digital marketing space and is a passion project for him. As CEO and Co-Founder of One Creation Corporation, Zohar leads a team working to help brands progressively gather and digitize customer preference data to personalize experiences in a cookie-less, ethical and transparent way. Prior to this, Zohar held leadership roles as Global Head of Technology and Data Sales at Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Data Services, Head of Sales and Support at SuperDerivatives, and leader of IBM’s Trading Solutions Group.

2. Please tell us a bit more about your startup – what does it offer, what problem does it solve, and who is your target audience?

Brands have relied on 3rd party cookies and 3rd party data providers to build an inferred view of their customers by combining this data with their 1st party data. With the implementation of tight privacy laws across regions and the deprecation Google and Apple are executing to eliminate the 3rd party cookie and tracking, brands are looking for new ways to complete their customer 360 profile so they can personalize the experience and build trust with their customers. We are their trusted partner to solve that issue for them.

One Creation creates the ability for brands to engage both known and unknown visitors across omni-channel experiences and incentivize them to share preferences that enable a more personalized experience. This in turn builds trust and ensures the brands compliance with all applicable data privacy laws globally.

By partnering with One Creation, our customers have reduced wasted ad spend, reduced dependency on 3rd party data providers while increasing engagement and sales from their customers because they have the most accurate data to personalize the whole customer journey.

OC targets CMOs at brands or Retail Media Managers at retailers. We have a direct marketing approach as well as a partner channel sales approach. Our partners are Ad agencies who want to present their brands with a solution to their problems. We also target the top 5 Customer Data Platforms Providers (CDPs) who are keen to add these innovative tools to their arsenal and upsell opportunities.  

3. What inspired you to start your own business? What was the “aha” moment?

One Creation was born from a personal experience, when Zohar’s son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. After returning home from the hospital the family was bombarded with ads, emails, and sales calls promoting pumps and other diabetic supplies. The problem with that is there was no clear understanding of the transaction involved, his son’s condition and to be shared and no details offered on how or how long the family’s data would be used.

Because of this, Zohar set out to put the control of data back into the hands of the owner and make time-based permissions the rule for brands, rather than the exception.

4. How did you identify a gap in the market or need that your business fulfills?

The most effective way to paint a more complete picture of your customers is to ask them. One Creation is the data enrichment platform that gathers zero party data through customizable consumer experiences.

With the upcoming “cookie-pocalypse” and disappearance of 3rd party data collection, marketers need to pivot if they want to continue to personalize their customers experience and build meaningful, personalized relationships. Even if they are sitting on massive first party data, 3rd party inference still does not fill the gaps the brand has on the customer’s persona:

-6 out of 10 consumers reject third-party cookies

-Customers give the bare minimum data required to make a purchase

-Customers make purchases with no guarantee of future interactions

So how does a brand adjust to a cookie-less future, the advent of AI personalization an ever-tightening privacy environment and a basic lack of trust in brands?

With our data enrichment platform, companies can fill in the gaps in their customer data driven strategies by building longer, more trusting relationships with customers while elevating brand data quality, collecting 40% more data, increasing campaign ROI, and building more nuanced customer profiles. Consumers gain transparency over how their data is used and control over their own data.

• Provide embeddable, personalized trust building tools such as transparency and timed consent to give customers comfort in providing more insights to the brands along the customer journey. This results in as much as 80% lift in conversions and increase in revenues by 5% – 15%
• Progressive consent customer experience: With zero-party data, marketers can provide more relevant and engaging experiences across the customer journey leading to 20% increase in customer retention rates
• Reduced wastage: By having a clearer understanding of what customers want, marketers can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%
• Friends with data governance: Gathering data in a privacy compliant way

5. What has been your approach to funding your startup? Did you use your own savings, seek investors, crowdfund?

In addition to my personal investment, I reached out to select people in my network who were part of fundraising efforts for previous start-ups that I led. Additionally, some family, friends, and employees also contributed to the investment effort.

6. How did you go about building your team and attracting talent in the early days?

Similar to raising funds, I initially turned to people who I have worked with in the past, some of whom I’ve known for many years. With them and through their own networks and connections, we were able to build our team. We aim to maintain a great culture of empowerment and tell our team that their contributions are impactful. Ownership and empowerment attracts good talent.

7. What have been some of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make as a founder? Any stand out as pivotal?

Before our last strategic round between Barclsys bank and a large exchange, OC was close to running out of runway and had to make strategic decisions that included both the composition of the team, changing the target market fit. Both led to favorable results.

8. What have been your key strategies for growth and gaining traction/users?

This requires a massive sales effort and participating in exciting accelerators such as Barclays Rise Growth Academy which has helped us speak to many business and technical executives who have started our product to the right market fit.

9. How do you stand out from the competition in your space? What sets your product/service apart?

Our platform allows organizations to embed progressive consent into every point of their existing customer journey while offering better services, but also continuously enforces the consent (As well as Time Based Consent) and data sharing rules anywhere the data travels. Our patented platform brings together two powerful technologies, Smart Contracts and Cryptography, to achieve interoperability with both centralized and decentralized ledgers. We utilize a secure data wrapper and enforce consent and authorization rules anywhere the data travels, both inside and outside of any organization. It’s dynamic in nature, makes on demand decisions, and works on Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

10. What do you find most rewarding and most challenging about being an entrepreneur?

The satisfaction of feeling that the product we are creating is having a meaningful impact on a problem that plagues humanity as a whole is very rewarding.

The challenge is the emotional rollercoaster that it takes me on- the ups and downs of trying to secure customers is draining and stressful. Without extreme tenacity and perseverance, I would not have gotten this far.

11. What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start their own company?