Why India’s answer to GDPR could unlock bigger retail media budgets

India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) finally moved from draft to enforcement near the end of last year, bringing the country closer to global privacy regimes such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

For advertisers, DPDPA means more than just increased compliance requirements. At its core, the new policy changes how much trust marketers can place in the data they buy against; and that trust is what ultimately determines how, and how much, ad budgets move.

As DPDPA tightens rules around data collection and use, experts tell The Current that retail media, already one of the fastest-growing segments of India’s digital advertising economy, will be among the earliest and clearest beneficiaries.

Retail media is typically built on authenticated user relationships and first-party purchase data. For advertisers (both local and global), that makes the channel easier to justify in a privacy-conscious regulatory environment. The immediate result may not be explosive growth, but greater confidence in where spend is placed, according to executives who spoke to The Current on condition of anonymity.

An FMCG brand leader familiar with ongoing planning efforts says the focus has shifted from data accumulation to discipline. “We’re still formalizing our DPDP playbook, especially around consent documentation and internal data flows,” the executive said. “But the direction is clear. Cleaner permissioning should improve the reliability of retail data, which ultimately helps with attribution and long-term planning.”

A fast-fashion brand head echoed that view from a more performance-driven angle. “Retail media already relies heavily on first-party data, so DPDP feels more like a tightening of processes than a disruption,” the executive noted. “There’s compliance work in the short term, but the upside is clearer signals and more accountable targeting.”

Retail media’s opportunity

Sitting directly on transaction and purchase data, retail media platforms already function as what the DPDP classifies as “data fiduciaries,” with explicit responsibilities for consent, purpose limitation and data security.

Gopa Menon, COO and co-founder at Theblurr, describes DPDPA as forcing Indian marketers to confront long-ignored weaknesses in their data practices. “For years, Indian brands have been sitting on messy data lakes without really thinking through consent, storage or purpose,” he said. “Now there’s no choice but to get serious about governance.”

According to Menon, the shift is already visible in how organizations are restructuring internally. “The days of hoarding every possible data point ‘just in case’ are over,” he said. “The discipline is actually healthy. It separates serious players from those who were just winging it.”

There will likely be friction before DPDPA’s benefits fully materialize. Siddharth Dabhade, global chief business officer at Lemma predicts a short-term contraction before longer-term gains set in. “In the short term, DPDP will likely cause a temporary drop in addressable audience size as noncompliant, legacy data is purged and users exercise their right to withhold consent,” he said. “But over the medium to long term, clearer governance is poised to significantly strengthen both targeting and measurement by enforcing a transition to high-quality, consented data.”

A global opportunity

Beyond domestic reform, DPDPA also brings India closer to familiar global privacy standards, with direct implications for international ad spend.

“DPDP brings us much closer to what you see in Europe with GDPR or California with CCPA,” Menon said. “Global advertisers want consistency. When they’re planning campaigns across markets, having India follow recognizable privacy standards makes it easier to scale investment here.”

For retail media networks, that alignment could unlock a second wave of budgets. As Menon put it, “That trust factor unlocks bigger budgets. It professionalizes the ecosystem and makes India a more credible destination for sophisticated digital advertising spend.”

In that sense, DPDP functions less as a constraint and more as a legitimacy framework. For a retail media market that has grown rapidly but unevenly, that legitimacy may prove to be the signal global advertisers were waiting for.