Foresight 2024 preview: James Trott, Coca-Cola

NDA spoke to James Trott, Senior Director of Addressable Media Operations at The Coca-Cola Company, ahead of his appearance at Foresight on 12 September 2024.

Trott has over 12 years of experience in digital, data and technology, working at agencies groups Havas, Dentsu & IPG before moving to Coca-Cola.

Over the course of 2024, Coca-Cola has put plenty of focus into its digital advertising, including continued work on privacy-first solutions, which leverage first-party data to restore trust and confidence in programmatic advertising for people buying across the open web.

“A lot of confidence has eroded over the years,” Trott explains. “Many people question these practices but they are a really good way of transacting media, finding audiences and driving performance.

“We’ve been working to move from the open web to the curated web, while still delivering programmatically, but across a far more focused selection of publishers that have now passed certain quality criteria and scores.”

The company is also investing in building highly-sophisticated propensity models that will profile consumers who are exhibiting behaviours that mean they are likely to purchase one of the many products Coca-Cola has in its portfolio.

Trott expects that next year will see Coca-Cola – and the digital advertising space as a whole – increasing its focus on sustainable media practices and artificial intelligence even more than it already is.

“I think blockchain solutions are going to be more prominent. Sustainable media practices are going to shine through, because less is more, and energy efficiency almost always results in increased performance. Attention could become one of the default metrics to help us understand what is quality and what isn’t. And, obviously, the increased and enhanced use of artificial intelligence will mean it can be used to fulfil a number of use cases,” Trott poses.