The Real Time Race: Why Real Time Marketing Wins with Sightly’s Rob Trotter

Hosted by Ed Steer and Dan Bolter, Life and Digital explores the ever-changing media

landscape with today's industry leaders.

Hello and welcome to a Life and Digital podcast special.

I'm here Bob Trotter, Manager at Amir at Sightly.

Bob, great to see you.

Thank you, mate.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

My honor.

Yes, yeah.

I've seen these before.

Have you?

I've only been invited.

Oh, yeah, I know.

I know.

I'm speaking about Sightly's engine, oh, well, let's do this on the tape, couldn't

have that lately.

It's so long.

Yeah.

But yeah, as you don't know before we, well, we're good before we're jumping to Van

Queston TV.

We could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your creative day in Sightly

that I've been to town.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

So I'm Rob.

I'm an orphan or an incase you can't tell.

We're about, originally from Akring, we're a little town nestle between Burnley and Blackburn.

Not the most desirable part of the world, but you know what, it was close to Manchester

and that's where I started my media career.

I know, it's famous for an advert, though.

Exactly.

Yeah, famous for an advert.

Yeah.

But weirdly, with Liverpool meetings in the advert, so I get confused.

I'm not out far, but yeah, we're up in Akring to move to Manchester for uni and then

eventually fell into the world of radio advertising.

So I actually worked in the radio station and giving out flyers, doing all my stuff.

Yeah, so that's like, you know, you just come on some pocket money, and I actually had

like an ambition to get into production and that's that way, I actually studied that

uni.

It's a media production.

Yeah, media production.

So I was helping set up the bands that used to come into the radio stations at XFM,

at key one or three, and the idea was that I'd be a sound engineer and like, I just

love that world.

Yes.

But sadly, there's only ever one like proper sound engineer that works in that way.

Yeah.

And they're not going anywhere.

Yeah.

So I think after working there for a while, the job came up in the advertising team, of

which I knew nothing about, but you know, offered me a career, it was a salary, actually.

Yeah.

And then he was still working in the radio station, which was like an amazing place to

be because outside of London, at the time at our key, all the celebrities and all the

bands used to go up there is like, that's their stop-off point of when Manchester's a

great place.

Yeah.

And they all have that when I'm going to go to Global's Ops, isn't it?

Yeah.

There is a well factor about being around live entertainment and, yeah, it's like, yeah,

it's exciting.

It feels really good.

And so I sort of, you know, I had that kind of drum of what do I do, and actually, like

I'm not showing people, I went down the route of money and chose to chop these.

I remember when I chose to repeat, yeah, yeah, I was so glad I got into radio advertising.

I've got a real soft spot for radio advertising because, and it's doing better than ever as

well at the moment.

Yeah.

I mean, port cars were here.

Well, they could have worked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And sort of started out there plotting ads on to the system and planning campaigns, you

know, and then became a salesperson for power and repping sort of Manchester and leads.

And then eventually, I think I got on some sort of talent programme for power, which

meant I got time to London and I like, okay.

And then eventually got employed to move to London by power in the national team.

Within hours, it was lately, yeah, so I've made it sort of moved down south and convinced

my fiance at the time to move down with me.

I think I did about a year at power, down south, London, I got exposure to all the big agencies

and brands.

It's very different.

Was there a noticeable difference between them?

Do you know what?

It's just much bigger and there's just more recognisable national or multinational brands.

That was the big feeling for me.

I think just the sort of revenue and exposure to like the budgets was just far beyond what

I've been used to.

Yes.

The infrastructure in Manchester is very much the same, you know, so got the big ad agencies,

you've got that media, like network of people, like, and that booming now as well, a lot

of the brands have taken there.

It's been back up to Manchester because, you know, there's great people up there and

Italian and stuff.

And yeah, investment, a lot of the agency can move a lot of the staff there.

But London was just sort of like a different world than it was working on these big, multiple

brands.

And anyway, a year into working at power in London, less than they'd sort of like convinced

me to come down.

I'd only done a year in the London office before I was asked to go and work at a digital

like ad network called Collective, selling rich media, which in 20, I think, 2014 was like

the head of the curve.

It really was actually here.

Yeah.

There's a couple of other businesses like specific and I can't remember the other time,

but we had a really strong, yeah, yeah, we had a really good time there.

And this was like the first, you know, the first sort of ad network, really.

And we had a great team of people and a great culture, and I really learnt digital

then.

Was it on Charlotte Street?

Yeah, you know what, it was, it used to be on Charlotte Street and then when I joined

them, great mall, but that's the perfect location, lots of pubs, you know, you like

fast delivery and all the nice places to get gifts, but it was an, it was just an amazing

place to work and I'd kind of had to learn very quickly digital and speak that language

and I know I've done this radio advertising at an end point, but I knew that that's where

the market was going.

Right?

You know, ages ago, it was sort of people were talking about that within these traditional

media settings, but you want to get into digital.

So sort of made that jump, did that work there for a good six or so years, ended up, you

know, becoming a grouphead, then becoming the head of sales, and then that business was

bought by Timing, who then ended up disbanding and becoming a future PLC and as what it now

is easier.

Yeah.

It was a big part.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So right when that happened, I was sort of in the room when it was being announced that

it was going to get broken up, I'd already accepted then a job, gum gum, which was

to go on work with Pete Wallace.

And at the time, gum gum had like 10, 15 people in the office, and what they have was this

cookie-less solution, right?

Right when Google said, we're going to deprecate the cookie.

And all these other businesses were scrambling around to think, how are we going to have this

like cookie-less solution?

Out of interest.

Was that pre-COVID or post-COVID or content in the market?

That would have been in the moment that I joined there in 2020 in the March, or may I think

it was?

I was actually working.

I was on furlough from my previous job.

Yeah.

I was already working on it, so I agreed to help out.

Yeah, agreed.

I could just be off right up until the new job started.

And so I joined in a completely virtual way.

Yeah.

I would actively.

Yeah.

I wasn't really equipped to work your own board.

Me.

None of that.

And I had some work.

I was going in as a sales director of an all-be-small team, but I never met these people.

Yeah.

person for about a year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was almost entirely virtual.

But I think what gum gum did really well in that time was they had this product, right?

That was going to solve the solutions.

Cookie-less.

They had machine learning.

There was at the time, even 10 years old, and what they didn't turn the taps off.

Expenses and things.

So we were able to like look after our clients or be it virtually and give so we'd have

the meals that we've cooked.

Yeah.

Do you do any of the really weird things like we did so many virtual escape rooms?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Some crazy stuff.

I've got to give a shout out to a guy called Tom Barber.

He's not this type of guy.

Yeah.

But Tom was like incredible at like the front.

I mean, all of these ideas.

I don't have like direct shows and quizzes and he would host it all.

It was like an amazing place time to be there.

And actually, yeah, we prevailed really and the message got around.

We had this kind of product.

It's good people.

And it just sort of blew up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think gum gum's, you know, probably one of the biggest sort of like contextual businesses

on the planet now.

And we had a great team.

You're so amazing.

You have great people.

Yeah.

With the product, obviously, it's the secrets.

Well, exactly.

It was a good team of people.

And it had that sort of like start up scale culture at the beginning.

And then they actually made some really good acquisitions.

So we acquired just premium who actually worked out of this very office.

Oh, really?

Yes.

Where we are now.

Yeah, we had more space in this building.

And at the time, just because we didn't have an office, we worked very close.

We've brought him.

He asked if they could take some space.

So yes, they did these to work out.

I was obviously.

Yeah.

Well, the acquisition of Rob Garber.

I got to come in contact with him.

We had the most unbelievable couple of years just integrating the two businesses.

And it just worked so well.

They had footprint in Europe.

We had a lot of architecture technology.

They could deliver a real high impact, which media programmatically line all just made sense.

And then the final acquisition later in the same year, I think, was playground.

Yeah.

Z.

Australian company family by Rob Hall.

And that basically the premise of that business was all that attention.

And so the idea was we had a contextual business in Gumball with a creative business

with just premium and then an attention led business with with playground.

And those three things together were really powerful message.

So Gumball just explored it, you know, as a company in the UK and as well globally

and a required businesses in other markets.

So I was there for six and a bit years.

I started the sales director.

I think that was commercial director.

And then ultimately looked after all the trading deals with the major groups and indies.

And sort of anything commercial.

Yeah.

And then, yeah.

And then basically was approached by Sightly.

Well, actually by a guy called Giles IV that XC of MIQ, who was actually.

And collective.

And collective.

My uncle.

Correct.

Yeah.

So we'd stayed in contact for a long time and need being approached actually.

So I believe that one of the CEOs of ICG was in New York and he caught wind of this product.

It was doing really well for IPG in the States.

And he had a conversation with this our CEO Adam Capson.

And you know, we you should exist in Europe in the UK.

And sort of like our CEO kind of put you money where you mouth is I who should run this business

and Giles was surfaced as one of these guys that could do it.

Yeah.

And one thing led to another, Giles approached me.

And ultimately did the elevator pitch on me and kind of won me over

and I think like I can tell you a bit about it.

But ultimately what got me was that they're speaking in a similar language to what I was used to

at gum gum.

They're a contextual business.

But they exist within those world gardens.

So all the social channels and YouTube and really like what I was nuts and you know,

revenues just continue into pump into those platforms as they just advance and get bigger

and better.

And that's where the audience is.

So, you know, if you're working in my world like you want to go where that audience is

and and sightly offers that really.

Yeah.

I really want to talk about the slightly products and it is so cool.

I know you took the puns to do it.

But before it say, how has it been?

So you went from there.

You know, big business in Bauer.

It's collectively did the start with the growth bit and you know, I mean for large organization

gum gum became a big organization.

Yeah.

As the end of the year, I guess it was you and Giles and so how's that been?

Yeah.

It's been crazy.

I always tell the story, you know, do you see why it's it's kind of well, I don't have

an office.

So yeah.

No, but maybe because of that, but we it's been really it's been a brilliant experience

and part of the reason why I wanted to join is, you know, I'd been at businesses when

they were in that.

If you want to call it a scale of scale, yeah, they've got staff, they've got infrastructure

but they're at the beginning of that journey.

And with sightly, it was literally, you know, working with our chief people officer to

look at healthcare and pensions and setting up a UK entity and bank accounts in the UK

and Europe.

Like, you name it.

We've had to think about that starting up a brand new business, which I've loved this

process.

It's been amazing.

But yeah, Giles and I working out a lot of hotel lobbies, finding the best coffee shops

in London that have Wi-Fi, the works, really just having as many physical meetings as

possible is a stay warm in the winter of the UK.

But yeah, it's been, it's been different in a sense that there's no team in the UK.

Yeah.

But my American colleagues support me like, you know, all the time when they can.

The plan very much is to grow this, this team in this office, which is so exciting.

So tell us about the sightly, you were drawing in, but the fact that they've recommended

which occurred from lots of people that are sightly from their agency partners, you know,

into other agencies.

And I've been to really cool operations with WPP, I've been.

Yeah.

So what is the tech and what problems does it solve?

Yeah.

Okay.

So I suppose if you were to go on our website, what sightly would tell you it does is we're

trying to help brands move at the speed of culture.

So in 2020, Adam Katz, the CEO basically came up with this idea that a lot of CMRs were

talking about missing the moment.

I mean, if something was to go viral, a viral trend tends to come and go in 72 hours.

It's that right.

Yeah.

And that's the ship you've got.

So yeah, it tends to come and go, right, that trend might continue for a week, for two

weeks, whatever.

But that initial sort of spike in interest, the bit that you want to go away for a ride

on.

Yeah.

Comes and goes within a matter of days, a few days, and there was no technology to allow

brands to really like capitalize on that.

Yeah.

And no marketing team really has the muscle memory to do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, good example of the brand that does that is save us right and they do it because

they've got a process in place, right, to set themselves up.

But there's also an AI, there wasn't any technology to allow brands to do it.

So sightly set out to basically solve that problem, to capture culture.

And now in 2026, like you can't move without agencies or brands talking about moments

that matter.

It is.

It is.

It feels like they've got in right this perfect time.

Yeah.

They've got a great platform, you know, they've solved the problem and the technology's integrated

into all these big wall gardens.

So what they had to do in order to like make this validated is we're part of the YouTube

measurement program.

There's only seven people who think I'm going to want.

So from a medium, you have to have relationship within the wall gardens to make it.

Yeah.

You can do it, you know, some businesses might be able to gain data through like a third

party.

Yeah.

But it's better if you have a direct integration than platforms.

So for us to be part of that YouTube measurement program is a massive deal.

You get access to 18 million videos, loads of data that comes in inventory across any

market that they exist in and you've got that Google accreditation.

So if you sign an agency or you're a client like that speaks for you, right?

Yeah.

So for us, what that means is our technology can directly link into that platform as a

cursor.

So we can activate it directly in there and we can take signals directly in.

We also have a marked in batch accreditation with TikTok.

Yeah.

So a relatively new accreditation, they've released a similar sort of thing to the program

with YouTube.

That gives us top 200 training hashtags per day per category.

So from what I understand, if you don't have that accreditation, you can still get some

data from TikTok when you probably likely to get a top 100 hashtag level data per week.

So we're getting top 200 per category per day as well as a cursor.

Huge amount of data just from the rolls to platforms.

So would I be right?

I think you see your customers are gets mostly sold by agencies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they're already running both campaigns.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they're able to use site to decide where to spend on the day.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Within those environments.

Yeah.

So this is like we aggregate all of this data and we aggregate openware and CTV and other

social platforms and it all gets refreshed every few minutes with the platform.

The point here is that the top training thing on TikTok right now might be completely

relevant to boots.

Yeah.

Or, you know, a bonafone.

Yeah.

Right.

But there will be a subset of trends and topics that are happening all the time that are

completely relevant.

It could just be that it's how do you understand like those moments and so the technology ultimately

what we ask a brand to do is they'll come to sightly will work with them to build effectively

a profile within our platform of that brand of their brand of everything to do with

its brand values.

It will be its influences that it would like to monitor ambassadors.

It's already linked with immense temple events.

You know, this isn't like the World Cup.

It could be a craft world fair, right?

Yeah.

Everything you can imagine about this brand, we work with the strategies to buy the agency

or the brand to build this out.

And then the idea is that when the campaign goes live, moments start to appear in our

platform, the pertinent to that brand based on that profile we've built up.

Yeah.

So if you're a tell call business and you're happy to hear about business news, then tell

co-related business news if it was to trend as boring as that sounds.

If that starts to trend, we'll hear about it with all the fun, et cetera.

That will be a moment that's surfaced for them.

And then the idea is that we give them a call to action.

You can lean into this content, you can monitor it or you can disregard it completely.

How is yours?

Do you recommend what platform to then run a campaign on?

Is it in tin-out versus meta versus YouTube?

Would you give them the platform?

Yeah, sort of.

Yeah, exactly.

So we basically, you know, we'd get a brief like anyone else, and there'll be an audience.

Once you've built the profile, what happens is a persona is then create and you can have

multiple personas.

That's a persona to have a name for.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And what do we have at the other day, renovating which is for some for a furniture brand?

Okay.

But yeah, the personas get created.

That's the starting point of the targeting strategy.

Okay.

And then wherever that brand wants to advertise, it could say I want to be on YouTube,

TikTok, meta, snap, yeah, firmware, etc.

That's the starting point of the campaign.

The lay down of where that budget goes, comes from our knowledge of where the audience

is really.

Yeah.

I say it's going to be a, you know, Gen Z audience, then like TikTok, it's probably going

to take more of that share of that.

But when the moments appear, we'll be trapped in those moments, period across particular

platforms.

And we can evolve that targeting strategy as a campaign, eat alive.

Yeah.

And the other thing that the agency is getting really excited about is historically people

have bought very rigid sight lists, URLs, random lists, you know, you can't really deviate

away from that.

So if something was to happen in culture, you can jump on that moment.

Where is this technology in large?

You'd be quite fluid with that targeting strategy.

Yeah.

Very cool.

And you mentioned you said, Brett, when brands are building it, the side of it talk about

what influence is they wanted to be attached.

It's quite interesting that that's one of the staffing points now in terms of where brands are thinking from like, you know,

strategy, what do you, what channels are you seeing brands mostly debate on in terms of influencer versus CTV?

You're seeing like, I'd say that I would say that I'd say that our most sort of popular platforms at the moment are,

it's still you, like YouTube still takes up a lot of money.

And influencer, I suppose it could be, but it eats, it's still the lion's share of a brand's budget in my opinion.

Most brands will almost always be spending on YouTube, and it'll be quite significant amount to spend more sort of like

modern brands, if you will, that are trying to tap into a younger audience, are starting to wheel like TikTok into the US now.

In this market, there are platforms that are still very popular,

but meta still popular, whereas in the States, it's a little bit less so.

Is it ready? It comes up a lot here. They crushed it, haven't read it.

It's doing really well, I will.

Yeah, really smart platform, a lot of our signals come from Reddit, you know, there's a lot of content that no matter what it is,

you might have gone look for, right?

Yeah.

But Reddit is something that's requested a lot, and also Pinterest is obviously a brand that people want to be on as well,

that brands want to active it on.

But at the moment, I would say that it's sort of in that order of YouTube TikTok, and then others.

Yeah, on that.

Instagram?

Yeah, Instagram, yeah.

So that all that meta, please, doesn't say that, yeah.

Instagram is still pretty big here, but when I talk to my US colleagues, they're just a bit surprised about that.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

Maybe I have to spot to the wrong person.

I'm like, isn't everyone still on that?

Of course.

Those that hate that just mean.

Yeah, exactly.

I did say I thought, okay, US office.

About the content.

I mean, what could you do to me about America's, I don't have to do eye message.

Yeah.

What are the other things?

Yeah, yeah.

It's fascinating to see how curious is of where you find people, and how you find people.

Yeah.

So there's so much technology available to planners now.

And of course, AI agents, there's no different angles people that take you,

marketing in, watching their needs for the role of the media planner.

How hard is planning now versus what it used to be?

Yeah.

How's it going to evolve?

Well, hopefully, it's going to become easier for some planners.

So we've just done a deal with WPP.

Yeah.

We've done more with Horizon.

We've got a bunch lined up.

And basically, we're essentially helping to power in WPP's case that planning the tool.

Okay.

And that's essentially merging, you know, bank of panel and insight data,

real time, cultural signals.

So it's a really tangible thing.

And if you're a strategist or a planner at WPP,

you can go into the internal platform, and it's basically a chatbot,

like chatGPT style into it.

You're talking, yeah.

And you can just go in there and say, I work on Tesco, right?

Tell me everything I need to know about Tesco.

And it'll come back with all of this historical data running the challenges,

extrinsies, weaknesses.

And then based on the brief, you can ask it to essentially write your media plan

and a recommendation.

And like what this is doing, this isn't sort of to remove jobs

or anything like that.

This is actually just giving a lot of time back to strategists and planners and miners,

removing a lot of the mundane stuff.

So you create more high value work.

Yeah.

There's teams of people that are there helping to create personas, for instance.

The teams of people that are following the influencers, ambassadors,

waiting for that lightning and bottle type scenario to happen,

scraping hashtags, like technology can do that for you now.

Yeah.

So we can take back some of that like admin-related jobs and give them time to think.

So some of the conversations we're having now with a lot of the groups,

based on this tech is amazing.

Because you can see this starting to like think how they could use this to help them

and sort of challenge that they weren't able to do.

We would take them a week to figure out.

Yeah, the launch is awesome.

I want to come back to those.

But if I'm a planner and I'm using my internal agent to talk about,

no, it's true brand, or how to buy a way to plan a campaign.

How many different tech platforms are plugged into that?

So it's slightly data, data partners.

There must be a whole bunch of platforms that are coming together.

Yeah, I think the agencies, like fundamentally,

like we're just one agent, right?

Within this bigger machine, it's WPP.

They'll be integrating retail media into their,

they might have a few of them data, they might have all these different things to

corner data, you never, you never call by a, you know,

an additional data, etc.

So we don't really get exposure to what those inputs are and how they're going to use them.

We are quite literally the real-time element to real-time.

Which is very cool.

Yeah, but they can activate it in slightly.

Yeah, they can act, they can act to me.

On site, they're going to be able to do that from their own platform.

It's just making people look and feel smarter and do things quicker.

What they're doing there is really cool, but also a lot of the other ad agencies

that we're working with are creating their own tools, right?

And they're just telling a story in a different way.

And then we're helping to enrich those forms as well.

And so the big coos for WPP AI roll out, you know, Horizon Horn.

How do they, how do they work practically?

In your UK role, is it, is that landing here when you get to go and speak to the WPP guys

about the US?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, so look, I think the thing that they know about more than anything is that they're on this

journey to use, they're in this agentic era, right?

And they're going to be using these agents to better their careers and help their clients.

What's great about for me personally is that when I walk into into their building,

I can show them a tool that they're familiar with, that they are, that they can go and use for free.

You know, and they've got me there to walk through that process, if they want.

So, practically, it's great, it's great for someone like me.

And anyone else that exists in that platform,

if you're able to sort of, you know, walk them through their own internal program

and help them.

Yeah, to help them.

Yeah, for someone to contribute with me.

And when you are speaking to agencies and martyrs,

what do you think the most on their mind when it comes to how to be effective

as effective as possible when it comes to planning and executing campaigns in today's world?

What do you think of the hot topics on people's minds at the moment?

I think the hot topic is, like, technology can allow you to,

like, jump on these moments very quickly or dive into a conversation.

But the thing that a lot of like panels and people are talking about at the moment is,

how do you remain authentic, though, like if a big multinational brand

that she used to talk into a millennial audience

dives into a Gen Z conversation.

You should get a courtman there.

And they get it wrong, like, that's that worse than, you know,

they're missing the moment entirely.

So, there's a lot of like chat.

I think there's a lot of conversations for brands at the moment

about the love this idea of real-time marketing and targeting moments.

But there's still a resistance to, like, just automatically do that.

So, we always have this sort of extra level of, like,

human, um, call to action.

There's things like these are moments that are surfacing.

This is content we think you should be around, like, you know,

do you want to dive into this or not?

And like, they get the final approval.

Some brands are, like, dole for it.

I just want to be around anything, celebrity, scandal,

or whatever, right?

And they're happy to do that.

What are the lines of the persona?

Yeah, yeah.

All the lines of the persona and their risk tolerances and, like,

they're into, you know, um, what type of brand they are.

Like, we'll ask them opinions.

Like, are you happy to be around a sport yet?

Are you happy to be around a sport with intentional violence, like,

boxing, like, some brands, like, no, others are, like,

yeah, of course, we sponsor it.

Yeah, I just seldom do.

So you can sort of, you can move these dials

and you start to get feeling for, like,

where a brand is and how they're going to react.

But yeah, so, so a very new and exciting world,

like, the idea of capturing culture and targeting cultural moments.

And I think it's going to change, to be honest.

I'd like to think it could change the way

that planning and buying has existed.

Yeah.

It's only when you work in this space, you look bad.

And you think, God, how old fashion?

Like, we, you know, we'd get a brief

two months in our fans of a campaign going live.

We'd plan that.

And we'd move on to the next brief.

The agency or the brand would move on to the next, the next brief.

And then by the time that goes live,

the world could have changed.

Let, let alone like the flight time of that campaign,

anything could happen.

Yeah.

And we, no one's been set up to sort of react

to anything that may or may not act.

Everything is happening faster.

And yeah, and, and, and, and chat even though

Prudent, and they look at you doing live news is hard

or do a new design of what can be even if it feels a bit outdated.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, totally.

So, so we always talk about that.

It's kind of like the most powerful

advertising opportunities of the unplanned ones.

And so if you can, if you can come somewhere close

to being able to jump on those moments,

then that like you've hit the jackpot.

If you align your brand with with a moment

where there's elation and people are interesting,

all these things, this, this, this, you know,

the idea of, um, of a trend is it's an observation.

Evolks some sort of emotion.

And then it invites participation.

And like we've all been there.

Like I'm very, very rarely shared stuff.

But when I do it, probably because I'm like really excited

about the sporting moment, I want to talk about it.

So in that moment, everyone's feeling excitable.

And I mean, and like brands are on this quest

to try and find that of like positive sentiment.

And they're like, yeah, correct.

And so if we're here in a year's time,

what to think is going to be different

the same where we are in the journey.

Well, I think I just get a feeling that like we've,

we've, you know, without being on bias.

Like, I feel like slightly are really like kicking the tires

on real-time marketing.

And I've already been invited to a couple of events

and panels to talk about culture and targeting culture.

This for me is going to be in 2026.

So this in tandem with this agentic era

is going to be about how can, how can your brand capture culture.

And so it wouldn't surprise me if other businesses

start to lean into this narrative.

I think DCLs are probably going to be an innovation in this space.

The idea that, you know, if you're an Amazon,

when you have multiple lines of product

across different verticals and a particular moment appears

that since sport really will serve the sport related to that,

if it's food and drink will serve the food and drink what

and it can be done in real time.

So that whole like, that's really the final piece

and the puzzle, I would say, is this don't true DCL product.

Yeah, it's cool how real-time go, right?

They're real-time, you know, real-time staff didn't,

but like 20 years ago, they didn't have the real-time bidding

in terms of when the bid happened,

but real-time has become so much more that it's happened

the moment.

Yeah, the moment.

Not all when the bid goes in from a campaign.

So that's probably the moment you're talking to.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And then it's pretty like, you know,

AI can allow you to understand the map of the moment.

The moment is like, the topic, what is it about?

It's its velocity, how can we insisting, like,

proliferating the magnitude, how big has it got?

It's life cycle.

Are we at the beginning, the middle of the end of this thing?

And once you understand those four pillars,

you can train AI to identify, like,

all these different elements.

And that's how you can link it back to a brand or its profile

to identify these moments and jump on them.

But yeah, I think it's going to be a big year for,

whether you want to call it real-time marketing or a moment

marketing, showing culture.

It already feels quite prevalent and a lot of people are talking about it.

So in a year's time, I'd like to think we're,

you know, don't know if we're doing it 100 million quid, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

OK, yeah.

Yeah, well, I'm sure from seeing that.

I'm sure from sight, you would love to answer all this.

All right, well, it's been a real pleasure.

I would have ended with a happy moment, a happy thought.

So let's do a progress check in on handcatchers.

Yeah, in, in, OK, in judes.

We can see, see what's going on, but with some sunshine.

Wait, I'm a lot in the home.

Not great, I'm not.

Some rosy sound.

Yeah, I'm touched.

Yeah, thank you, Ed.

Oh, thank you.

It's a lot of time here.

Thank you, cheers.

Thank you for listening to today's episode of Life in Digital.

If you want to know more about our guests or any of the topics

that we cover today, you can find out more in our show notes

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