Data and technology company Sightly has continued its expansion into EMEA with the appointment of Rob Trotter to the newly-created role of Managing Director, UK. Formerly Head of Trading & Commercial Development at GumGum UK, Trotter brings more than a decade of experience across media, trading and programmatic strategy.
New Digital Age spoke to Trotter to find out more on the move…
What attracted you to your new role with Sightly?
For me, the attraction is two-fold.
Firstly, the opportunity to grow a business from the ground-up in Europe. It’s an exciting chance to build a team, company culture, and introduce a pioneering product to the UK market. Working alongside my former boss and friend, Giles Ivey (which is a huge plus) also added to the appeal. Giles, with his wealth of experience, introduced me to Adam Katz – Sightly CEO. I was immediately struck by Adam’s vision and energy, which convinced me this was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss.
Adam and his team have developed a product that combines video, social media, and AI into one streamlined, actionable platform. As brands increasingly focus their marketing efforts on these areas, being part of this space felt like the natural next step in my career.
Secondly, I am drawn to the unique nature of the Brand Mentality® product. Sightly has created an end-to-end platform driven by signals, with the ability to activate on some of the World’s biggest platforms. It’s a social listening tool that analyses millions of signals daily, capable of providing brands with real-time insights and immediate calls to action – allowing them to seize emerging opportunities.
What excites me most is its reactive capability – detection of cultural shifts, trending topics, and potential risks before they hit the mainstream. In a market where most tools are proactive or pre-planned, the reactive nature of this product offers a significant USP that sets it apart.
Why are Sightly’s solutions relevant to contemporary marketers?
In digital, brands often feel forced to choose between speed, scale, and relevance. Sightly eliminates those tradeoffs, allowing brands to move with culture while delivering real outcomes.
As a long-time member of the YouTube Measurement Program and a certified TikTok Marketing Partner, Sightly brings unmatched expertise. Our anticipation technology doesn’t just “listen” – it closes the loop by turning cultural insights into an activation strategy. That means less lag, less waste, and smarter targeting.
It’s more than just spotting trends. Every cultural signal is scored for velocity, magnitude, alignment, and relevance – so clients can act fast without losing authenticity.
What, for you, are the big talking points in the industry right now?
The first is smarter AI adoption – that means moving out of pure content generation to actually solve complex, time-consuming workflows. Creative governance at scale is one of the most overlooked factors and Sightly’s acquisition of BrandGuard brings this to the forefront, helping teams reclaim weeks of review time to focus their efforts on creativity and production.
Brand suitability is another hot topic. The conversation is shifting from simply avoiding risk to showing up in the right moments. Niche communities and interests are becoming easier to find through clever technology, offering new category entry points. The smartest brands aren’t trying to be everywhere, they’re showing up meaningfully where it matters. That shift toward precision vs. mass awareness is going to redefine how media is planned, creative is made, and partnerships are chosen.
Video continues to be a leading vehicle for brands, and ad-agencies are building incredible platforms to make sense of this shift in viewing behaviour. Companies like Sightly are helping them to enrich their dataset and be way more targeting and brand safe across YT, OLV, CTV and Social.
Are there any other trends ‘bubbling under’ right now that you think may become more important?
Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) is one. With the advancement of AI in the creative space, it’s giving advertisers the opportunity to be way more aligned to the content they’re appearing in. We’re able to serve ads with incredible precision, but DCO is still in its infancy. Recently Sightly acquired BrandGuard which paves the way for the next phase of the Brand Mentality® platform, by helping to enable real-time creative and messaging consistency across content and culture in the age of generative and agentic AI.
It’s important that EMEA is the epicenter of privacy regulation. This gives marketers the agility to act in real-time while staying privacy-compliant – turning regulation into a growth advantage. We think this is going to become an important differentiator in the European market. Often brands are afraid to react or simply don’t have the timeframe or resource to do so.
There’s also more and more of a desire from brands to know where their investment is going. Transparency on where spend is going has to be requested, not necessarily shared as standard. Sightly provide full visibility into where budgets go, how decisions are made, and what outcomes you’re achieving. We envisage this to be a standard way of working in a World of AI based advertising.
What are your ambitions for Sightly as UK MD?
Aside from scaling this business and expanding its partnerships, I want to showcase how smart and innovative the UK and European markets are. Some of the best marketers in the World reside in London, and have an inquisitive nature – we are willing to push the boundaries. I want Sightly to be seen as the go-to partner for real-time marketing, setting the pace for the UK and European market and offering something unique and exciting.
