It’s a gathering where agencies and their clients size up trends in consumer technology, content consumption and distribution to “help tell stories together on those platforms or through those vessels or through things that maybe haven’t peaked yet,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.

The ability to bring all of these fully or partially formed elements together for collaborative building is a far cry from other events described by Shlachter a “showcase of reels and demos and sneak peeks of things that may or may come to light.”

With so much to cover during the annual Digital Content NewFronts presentations, he’s looking for what’s actionable, most impactful and will help marketers transform their business and brands.

This can happen through new platforms, new partners or “new voices” to help tell marketers’ stories and connect with consumers “in new and better and more defined ways,” Shlachter says.

Also maturing a bit is Snapchat, along with its audience, according to Shlachter. Snapchat most recently revealed a deal with Moat to be able to provide a viewability score for its advertisers, as ADWEEK reports.

“There’s no shortage of content,” he says. What’s key is to understand how it works more seamlessly between platforms “because content doesn’t exist on just any one place anymore.”

We interviewed him at the Digitas NewFronts event.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“Data is paramount to every strategy we put together with our clients, with our partners. It’s sort of the universal language that we have not just to transact on necessarily but to plan against,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.

This language translates into understanding people as people, not just as broad-based segments to be traded on or targeted against. Tapping into mindsets and behaviors while grasping the effect of ad environments can unleash many useful changes.

“We can create better ads, we can certainly create better experiences and over time we can probably eliminate a lot of the waste that exists today,” Shlachter says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat.

That wastes derives from a lack of transparency, lack of connectivity and “quite frankly an overly complex media ecosystem that is not as connected as we’d like it to be.”

It’s been just over a year since Publicis Groupe began to transform its media operations, eliminating some divisions while merging agencies, as The Wall Street Journal reports. From a central perspective, the realignment facilitates greater intelligence sharing while providing better access to talent, resources and technology, according to Shlachter.

“I do believe that these transformations take more time,” he says. “You have to make sure you have all the right pieces in place. Nothing’s going to happen overnight.”

Nonetheless, he’s excited about the momentum Publicis has exhibited in recent months. And he marvels at the pace of the long-discussed convergence of data, technology and platforms, plus the growth of industry partnerships.

“We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. The next three to five years are going to be super interesting,” Shlachter says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

These were among a variety of possible scenarios explored at the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat during a one-on-one keynote session with Adam Shlachter of Publicis and Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. Among the agreed-upon certainties five years from now: 15- and 3-second ads will not be the predominant video ad units and gross rating points will be a currency, not the currency.

When YouTube launched its paid channels about four years ago, Shlachter, who was at Digitas at the time, viewed the company as a modern day MSO. “A vessel for programming, distribution, monetization and ultimately for audience,” is how he recalls it. While many people weren’t surprised that YouTube launched a premium subscription service, “That it exists now built into television sets or any device and any screen and it’s with you everywhere is something that I don’t think people were thinking about initially,” he said.

While both Facebook and YouTube have such massive audiences they cannot be ignored, “We’re also still trying to figure out the right way to engage with them,” particularly since their respective viewing experiences are so different, according to Shlachter.

Asked by Spiegel whether 15- and 30-second ads will dominate five years hence, Shlachter responded, “I hope not.” But he was skeptical about a headlong rush to reduced commercial loads wherein many units are transformed into content that could be more valuable to sellers.

“They have to figure out economically how to make that work,” Shlachter said, referring to companies like Fox. “We have to make the experience a little bit cleaner and we have to make it smarter.”

So why on earth would Netflix get into the advertising game? “Right now if you ask anyone they will tell you absolutely not because there’s no need,” he said. However, if net neutrality laws go in a certain direction and Netflix is taxed for its bandwidth consumption on different operators’ systems “maybe they have to look at alternative ways,” Shlachter added.

As for five minutes of commercials in one hour of content, he agreed it’s possible. In addition to ads taking different shapes in the next several years, cross-channel planning will see great advances along with closed-loop measurement models, according to Shlachter.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview at Mobile World Congress, Adam Shlachter, president at Publicis’ PMX division, says mobile is no longer a single thing.

“Mobile has disappeared at this conference,” he says. “It’s not as handset-forward, carrier-forward or network-forward. It’s more much about connectivity, personalisation, the way we live our lives, operate our businesses and how we connect.”

Shlachter will be keynote speaker at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico, next week.

Mobile World Congress is no longer just the world’s largest mobile expo and conference. It has grown rapidly in recent years to become one of a clutch of four or five global mega-conferences attracting execs and hangers-on from all kinds of industries.

Beside distinctly non-phone hardware on show, MWC’s main headlines were Nokia’s reintroduction of its classic 3310 handset (a move suggesting mobile launches themselves have run out of steam) and new smartphones that have less bezel and more screen.

But TechCrunch writes MWC is now about “general connectivity as well as the devices and services which will connect our world in the future”. And, just as brands and ad agencies flock to the Consumer Electronics Show these days, so, too, is Mobile World Congress now a big draw for ad-land.

Shlachter, who recently moved to PMX after a stint as president at sibling Zenith’s VM1, says advertisers must respond to a world in which mobile phones now jostle with voice assistants and connected fridges as just parts of an overall connected experience.

“The next big leap for brands is to figure out how to live in that world – how to take advantage of all the signal, how to create more personalised experiences that are unique for different platforms they’re being consumed on,” he says.

“We have to stop thinking about it as a silo or independent channel, we have to think about how it can have access everything else.

“Navigating this world is becoming increasingly complex. Brands have to figure out the role they want to play with the relationship they have with their consumers in these environments.”

This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.

From year to year at CES, Shlachter sees a lot of incremental changes in technology, particularly regarding connected vehicles and homes. “For me what’s most interesting is what can we do with that? It’s been a promise for a long time and I think it’s going to become more of a reality now, particularly between the car and the home and the person itself,” he says.

Uniform standards for targeting people with ads one-on-one and measuring the results will provide “better value for consumers and make more use out of the space that we play in,” he adds.

The convergence of the digital and traditional media worlds now more than ever is opening a whole new world of opportunities from a creative standpoint, according to Shlachter. However, new approaches are needed to move things along.

“We have to get past the days of trying to fit one creative concept into a lot of different screens and formats, because we see that it doesn’t work as well,” Shlachter says before acknowledging that it’s hard to create a lot of native experiences for every single platform across a 360-degree media plan.

Finding better ways to integrate data and technology to automate creative delivery will be more useful than trying to “create some one-size-fits-all messaging that may help us scale but may not pay off,” he says.

In the meantime, Shlachter is excited about the one-to-many approach that Verizon took when partnering with other companies to live-stream the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016. As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCUniversal produced a live stream of the parade separate from NBC’s broadcast that was shot with 360-degree cameras and viewable on Verizon’s YouTube page.

Calling it a “monumental effort,” Shlachter says Verizon garnered “a ton of positive feedback and sentiment from everything we were able to measure.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

We spoke with him about the changes underway in digital media.  This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES.”  Please visit this page to find additional videos.  The series is sponsored by YuMe.

We spoke with him about the advertising industry transition to an automated marketplace during the Cannes Lions Festival.

Shlachter was panelist on the topic of automatic advertising presented by the Rubicon Project during the Cannes Lions Festival. Please find more videos from the event here.

We spoke with him Monday night at the Yahoo NewFront program at Lincoln Center.  Our coverage of the event was sponsored by Yahoo.  You can find additional coverage here.

Asked if advertising measurements like CPMs should be replaced by client-oriented metrics like actual sales, DigitasLBi media activation head Adam Shlachter agreed: “What we should be focusing on is the outcomes we want to achieve.”

But the industry is not there yet, Shlachter says. “If I can plan on that in real-time, that’s great. To date, that takes months, if not years. It’s looking back in the rear-view mirror.

“I can’t always get at sales data … they’re not giving that to me in real-time, today at least … so I need proxies, I need to know that some engagement led to some lift in something else that led to sales.”

We spoke with him at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Leadership Summit where he was panelist, interviewed by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Minds. You can find videos from the event here.

“No matter what … it’s got to be clear, consistent,” says Digitas’ north America media activation head Adam Shlachter. “It’s got to have a distinct voice and perspective and be something people not just watch but talk about, keep coming back to – that’s hard to do.”

The difficult truth about branded video is that there are no quick wins and scale is very hard to achieve. “Unfortunately, it’s a bespoke approach you have to take each time, which does limit the scale,” Shlachter adds. “There’s no one way to do it – if there was, it wouldn’t be effective.”

Shlachter was interviewed by TouchCast co-founder Erick Schonfeld at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

He also speaks about the opportunities content marketing for brands and the imperative of making that content relevant and targeted to consumers.

We interviewed him at the Beet.TV executive retreat.