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Gilian Ponte wins EMAC-Enginius Doctoral Competition

10 July 2025
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Jaap Wieringa (left, Gilian Ponte's PhD supervisor) and Gilian Ponte (right)

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) is proud to announce that Gilian Ponte has won the EMAC-Enginius Doctoral Competition for his dissertation ‘Differential Privacy and Marketing Analytics’. Each year, the European Marketing Academy (EMAC) holds the EMAC-Enginius Doctoral Competition to recognize and encourage emerging talents in field of marketing.

Ponte obtained his PhD at FEB in 2024 and currently works as an assistant professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His PhD was supervised by Professor Jaap Wierenga and co-supervised by Associate Professor Tom Boot.

Differential privacy & marketing analytics

In his dissertation, Ponte explores the trade-off between privacy and data utility in marketing analytics. In this day and age, consumers are increasingly aware of privacy threats, which prompts regulatory bodies to enact privacy laws. In turn, this prompts analysts to reconsider their approach to marketing analytics, balancing between privacy and data utility. Differential privacy, a mathematical privacy definition, has emerged as the gold standard to control this trade-off.

In the first study of his dissertation - a simulation study that proposes a private data collection method - Ponte finds that privacy protection can be increased without a bias in aggregated insights, yet this introduces uncertainty. He indentifies how this uncertainty depends on the sample size, answer options, and privacy protection levels. In a lab study, Ponte finds that differential privacy protection reduces consumers’ perceived privacy concerns.

In the second study, he introduces a privacy attack to assess any dataset's privacy risk. Ponte finds that data protection methods without differential privacy fail to guarantee customers’ privacy. He therefore proposes a framework that generates data with privacy protection guarantees. In contrast to GDPR’s directive to minimize data collection, Ponte shows that customers’ privacy risk can be reduced by blending into a large crowd: a “Where’s Waldo” effect.

In the final study of his dissertation, he presents two targeting strategies: one estimates the causal effect of a targeting intervention and another that randomizes the targeting decision. Through simulation studies, Ponte visualizes the trade-off between privacy and profitability. In a field experiment, he applies both strategies and finds that the proposed strategies outperform a managerial heuristic to targeting.

Contributing to the future of marketing

Ponte received the award, along with a cash prize of € 3,000, at the EMAC Spring Conference 2025 in Pozuelo (Madrid), Spain. According to the EMAC competition’s selection committee, Ponte stood out among a highly competitive field for his creativity, rigor and contribution to the future of marketing. The competition is an annual initiative of EMAC and is sponsored by software company Enginius. One of the other finalists in the competition was Jana Holthöwer, who also obtained her PhD at FEB and is currently an assistant professor at the faculty.

Last modified:09 July 2025 4.06 p.m.
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