New Digital Age (NDA) in association with LiveRamp is spotlighting the men and women championing a data-led revolution in the marketing industry. The ‘Meet the Revolutionaries’ interviews focus on the efforts of the industry executives helping to drive digital marketing forward into a new era of data collaboration.
Here, Claire Trbovic, Group Business Director at SMG, offers her take on the most common challenges to innovation and how best to work around them…
Tell me about your current role.
I lead a small global team focused on identifying trends and innovations that will impact SMG and retail media over the next one to five years. We operate as an incubation hub, exploring everything from new business propositions to AI and technical innovations. The idea was to take a team out of the day-to-day business and give them the freedom to think differently – and it’s worked. Since launching this approach, we’ve expanded the model globally, proving that giving people space to innovate can lead to real breakthroughs.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally have helped to drive innovation?
One of our first big projects was exploring AI’s role in the business: where it fits, what’s possible, and whether we should build our own solutions or integrate third-party tools. That led to the development of our first proprietary AI tool, which we launched in December. We integrated AI into our Plan Apps platform, which houses all our campaign data. The AI now generates real-time commentary on campaign performance, summarizing key insights in a way that makes data instantly actionable. It’s about taking the complexity out of reporting and making insights more accessible for advertisers and suppliers.
What are the most common challenges to innovation?
Agility – or rather, the lack of it – is one of the biggest barriers to innovation. That applies to everything: project timelines, investment decisions, and company structures. One of the key reasons our team has been able to innovate successfully is that we were set up with agility at the center. We work closely with more structured, technical teams to ensure our ideas can actually be implemented. Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation—you need both an agile, experimental mindset and a structured, production-ready approach working together. When businesses struggle to balance these two forces, innovation slows down.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
Stakeholder engagement is everything. A great idea is only valuable if the business understands it, supports it, and ultimately adopts it. One of the most common pitfalls of innovation teams is working in isolation—developing something brilliant, only to struggle with getting buy-in when it’s time to roll it out. I always tell teams to be really strategic about how they communicate innovations. Who needs to hear about it, when, and in what format? Some stakeholders need a formal one-pager, while others might just need regular, informal check-ins to stay engaged. The smoother the communication, the easier it is to bring an idea to life.
Do you think ‘data collaboration’ will become more important to marketers?
The next few years are going to be incredibly exciting for data. Retail media is already transforming how brands engage with consumers, but the real shift will come from how we use data – not just for activation but for planning and measurement. Clean room technology is evolving rapidly, allowing retailer, brand, and publisher data to be combined in ways we’ve never seen before. The ability to layer and model different data sets, using AI to generate synthetic personas or simulate customer journeys, will change how campaigns are planned and optimised. We’re moving beyond first-party data into a world where entirely new insights can be created by connecting different signals in smarter ways. That’s where the real transformation is happening.
