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, Michael Barber, Innovation Lead at Virgin Red, advises on the importance of perseverance and communication in driving innovation and discusses the potential for personalisation to evolve beyond transactional use…
Tell me about your current role.
My role keeps me busy! In the first instance, I lead a small incubation team at Virgin Red that explores new product development opportunities primarily in the digital arena. Virgin Red is a loyalty scheme that operates across Virgin Group companies as well as other partners. In addition, I work internally around innovation, whether it’s automating processes or contributing to strategic thinking, essentially developing new ways of doing things that deliver value. I also support innovation more broadly across the Group, predominantly in technology projects, working with Virgin companies such as Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Voyages and Virgin Hotels on their innovation strategies, including some recent data collaboration projects.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally have helped to drive innovation?
We recently worked with LiveRamp on a data collaboration involving Virgin Red, Virgin Voyages and Virgin Hotels. We have around 40 different companies overall in the Group so we wanted to explore a number of hypotheses around how existing Virgin customers can be encouraged to buy from multiple Virgin companies and how to create a successful brand experience that allows us to talk to each other’s customers. The three parties hadn’t collaborated before in this space but we are now ‘sharing’ our collective data via the LiveRamp platform, and starting to analyze and understand the crossover between our different companies. Clean room technology means that we can share our data without actually sharing it.
The next step is to start activating against each other’s data. Remember that Virgin Red is a loyalty programme – we are already closely linked to Virgin Voyages and Virgin Hotels as customers can spend their Virgin Points with those organisations. What’s truly innovative is the idea of loyalty as a theme, as a process, as a currency, driving additional value for our group of companies.
What are the most common challenges to innovation?
We’re on the front foot in terms of trying to embed innovation within our organization, so we recently ran a survey of some colleagues within our organisation who are close to innovation and we asked them what they found to be challenging. The major blockers identified were time and resources. It’s about the prioritisation of innovation. It’s the ability to do it on top of the ‘Business As Usual’. I’m fortunate that I sit in a specific innovation team of an incubation unit where I can do new product development, but across the rest of the organization, the challenges exist: it’s the resource, it’s the time, it’s the commitment. We asked our colleagues what would help them to deliver more innovation and the response was more dedicated time, more training, and a greater focus on experimentation. So, those are the key areas that we’re exploring right now in enabling innovation across our businesses.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
There’s two key things. There’s the soft skill side in terms of perseverance. I was once Head of Product for a software company that launched its first ever cloud offering. We had it as a beta in the market for about 30 days before we pulled it – a lot of the other leaders in that business unit left shortly afterwards, but I stayed and persevered. I rebuilt that platform, and then 18 months later, I took it to market. So, to me, perseverance is an important factor. Stick with it and recognise that failure is going to come with the territory,
The second skill which is hugely important to innovation is ‘communication’. Again, I’m lucky that I have a team that’s really comfortable with continuous, rapid change. Not everybody likes that sort of constant disruption. Managing change is largely about communication, so it’s more than a soft skill; you need a plan and processes in place to communicate with different key stakeholders and you need to recognize that different groups need different styles of communication at different times.
How do you think digital marketing might evolve over the next few years?
I think the opportunity is in personalisation. Currently, personalisation primarily is focused on content and communication. With the emergence of AI and the utilisation of large language models and predictive analytics in core software platforms I think there’s an opportunity to go beyond the presentation of goods and services and become more ‘experiential’ in terms of personalisation. That will include the more boring ‘utility’ stuff, like payments and deliveries. That’s the next layer of the onion, as far as personalisation is concerned, whereby brands and organisations are able to offer a wider range of payment options that are more flexible and more tailored to the goods or services.
It’s difficult for travel companies to sustain a brand’s relationship with a customer beyond the initial purchase and experience. As the legacy software and data stores that underpin things like airlines, cruise lines, hotels, become more interoperable, we’ll see enhanced personalisation achieved end to end in new spaces. Sectors like gaming have already developed their ability to use data to create a sustained brand experience for longer. I think more traditional companies will start to do the same.
Do you think ‘data collaboration’ will become more important to marketers?
The main change will be more agentic style products starting to influence consumer behavior. Consumers are going to think more and more about the data that those products are processing to provide them with the utility, specifically when it reaches into commerce. Consumers will want to understand a bit more about that data, so there’s going to be a significant focus on trust. The organisations that will win out on data collaboration will be those that consumers feel that they can trust. Consumers will become more comfortable with the concept of data collaboration between the organisations that they do trust, even financial services companies. To date, personalisation has been a bit of a blunt tool, used primarily to drive a transaction. For the pioneers in this space, personalisation doesn’t simply drive a single transaction, it provides a service and has utility.
