5 Minutes with… Lalita Koehler
Life has a funny way of looping round in circles. Lalita Koehler started her career in technology, ending up in product management at Yahoo!. Advertising wasn’t really on her radar until she fell in love with a creative. She’d been living the tech life in San Francisco after moving there from her native Brasil – and while on maternity leave, a friend with a small advertising agency saw something in her and begged her to join as a digital producer. Over time, she started to learn about producing content and film, and moved into roles at the likes of The Martin Agency, Omelet and Saatchi & Saatchi, where she worked herself up to the role of chief production officer. Most recently, she was chief production officer, USA, at Publicis Groupe’s PXP. And now she’s gone global with McCann Worldgroup’s Craft.
And that tech background is coming to the fore, not only as Lalita and the Craft team implement AI for clients looking to personalise and localise thousands of permutations of their campaigns, but also when it comes to that ability to be flexible and embrace constant change.
At Craft, she’s found a home that’s given her a global perspective on production, which she’s relishing, but also a team of hardworking, friendly people that allows her to embrace the human side of production too, which suits Lalita to a T (she’s known to her friends and colleagues as an extravert and connector of people). Here, she catches up with LBB to share her journey and thoughts on the evolving world of commercial production.
LBB> You came to production from the tech world, which is a really unusual route – how did you become a producer?
Lalita> I’m very grateful that I worked for 10 years in tech before going to production, because I feel like I’ve gone full circle. Now we’re back in tech, we’re becoming a platform, and we’re becoming very tech-prone because of AI and automation..
There are two main things that happened in my life. I married a creative when we lived in San Francisco. That was a huge influence in terms of understanding creativity and the love for advertising. And then I had a friend in San Francisco who was opening an agency himself. I was on maternity leave and he would call me and say, ‘Come! I need someone like you!’. I said, ‘I don’t know, you guys are too hard, I don’t want to work in advertising.’. But he insisted and eventually I said yes. We were seven people and it was a startup agency.
I started digital production because that’s what is closest to tech. Through the influence of Fabio, I started to fall in love with content. It’s funny, at the time there was a pretty harsh division between digital production and digital content and film. I’ve always been very curious, like a little sponge trying to learn as much as possible. A lot of people put up boundaries for me, saying, ‘no you’re in digital production, don’t come this way’. And then there were a few key people throughout that journey that were very inclusive, took me under their wings and taught me how to do film and content.
There were a lot of projects that emerged that were both – a website full of content or an activation full of content. There was this cross pollination between the disciplines. I feel I was in a moment in time where, as a digital producer, you actually needed to understand multiple disciplines within production, and it forced me to be flexible.
Today, the boundaries are much, much more blurred.
LBB> How do you think that tech background at companies like Yahoo! has shaped the kind of producer you became?
Lalita> When I was in tech, we were transitioning from a waterfall methodology to an agile methodology. It meant we were doing mini sprints to get code faster to the marketplace and be a little more flexible with what we’re building.
There are so many things that I appreciate about my ten years in tech. They sent me to a lot of management training. Since my mid 20s, I’ve been trained in how to do change management, how to work with teams. When I moved to advertising, at the beginning, there was not a lot of training happening, so that gave me a foundation that I will be forever grateful for.
In tech, I worked for companies that were 20,000 people, 100,000 people large. So now, in production with the talk about scalability and volume of assets, I have this background of knowing how to work in very cross-matrix organisations that change all the time. Yahoo! used to move us to different buildings three times a year. So I’m not afraid of change and I’m used to it because I grew up in that environment. Change was a constant in our lives. You can’t really be stuck in the past. You have to be future thinking, and that’s where I feel we are with advertising these days,
LBB> I always think that great producers have a very particular skill set and personality – what is it about your personality that has made the production world such a very good fit?
Lalita> I called one of my best friends and I asked her this question, and she said ‘you’re a really strong connector. You’re never afraid of connecting people with the right people that they need to meet’. I always enjoy that.
Of course, as a producer, you have to be organised, but you can never assume anything. You’re always double, triple checking information. And different cultures produce in different ways.
I think you have to have grit because you will have challenges. Every day we’ll have at least 10 challenges that we’re going to have to troubleshoot. Successful producers are the ones that can keep cool and calm, and see beyond. You have to keep going and bring people along.
I love that we have deadlines in production, otherwise we’d never finish. Deadlines are super important because otherwise you keep doodling and noodling.
LBB> How does production differ in different cultures?
Lalita> My team and I had a big learning curve about how to produce in Japan – it produces very differently than other markets.
What I like about Europe is it’s more flexible, so sometimes you are able to achieve more with less.
As for the US, the amazing thing about being in Los Angeles for 10 years is that it’s the Mecca. The industry’s there with Hollywood, so you have all the resources available to you at a level that is pretty impressive, between the unbelievable art departments and the access to equipment. And talk about diversity of locations! We have access to the mountains and the oceans and Chinatown and Koreatown. I love when we produce in LA because of the infrastructure that is available and very, very proficient crews. When you don’t get a very experienced crew, you feel it in your soul. It all makes a huge difference when it comes to film. I think digital production has always been distributed since the beginning. You’re always working with people in different locations – they’ve been the pioneer of that.
LBB> As your career has progressed and you moved into more senior, chief production roles, how did you figure out the leadership element of your role?
Lalita> I love this topic because people think that you are born with leadership. No, it’s pretty hard work. I got better with time in terms of my style, I got my confidence. You start to learn what works, what doesn’t.
And you really need to like people, you know? I would say once you start growing your career, people management is the hardest thing ever. You need to be really attuned to human needs, your employee population’s needs, and how to motivate them. I quite enjoy that portion of how to create a really effective team structure and how we get everybody to walk in the same direction. And I enjoy mentorship.
LBB> You started at Craft Worldwide in June this year – what was it about the role that appealed to you?
Lalita> I worked in a global capacity when I was in tech, but in advertising I was ready for a global role. The fact that it was really anchored in creativity attracted me quite a lot. We had conversations about how to create, how to get tech involved in what we do, the role of AI… but also when I went through the interview process, I really liked the people. I felt they were very generous with their knowledge. It felt like, ‘OK, there’s something special here with this group of people. They really like each other.' We spend so many hours a day with our work colleagues that I wanted to be around people that understand the vision and drive towards that – who really like each other and act collaboratively. I didn’t want to be in an aggressive environment. It doesn’t mean that people are not hard workers – we like work! It’s intense! But there is a love for each other, and a respect.
LBB> Clients now have such enormous demand for content – content across all sorts of platforms, hyper personalised content. How does the scale and complexity of this need from clients shape the way you and the team at Craft are approaching production? How is it different from production of the past? I guess simplification is part of that?
Lalita> It’s about [the question of] the infrastructure that we’re building to support the volume of assets. We can’t minimise the explosion of content and the pressure that clients are facing. The budget has not multiplied with the volume of content. There are a lot of conversations around efficiencies and how to do things faster.
I think timelines are getting crunched quite a lot, and AI is the only way for us to be able to speed up a process that was, in the past, very manual. So in that area, AI is helping quite a lot. [It’s also useful for] pre-testing assets to make sure that the clients’ media budgets are being well utilised. In the past, we’d always do post-optimisation, now we’re doing pre-optimisations. AI can allow for that.
Those are the areas that I get very, very excited about, but it still allows us to have a craft when it comes to creating the original assets. That stays with us. It’s all about what happens after that, fulfilling the thousands and thousands of assets for clients in different channels. Like, let’s talk about e-commerce…!
LBB> E-commerce is a really interesting space for producers, because there’s so much logistics involved and you’re working with parts of a client’s organisation you never would have touched before…
Lalita> That’s 100% true. For some clients, we are helping them figure out logistics so we can have access to the product, to be able to create the assets. There are a lot of conversations with procurement on how to fulfil all the channels with marketing departments. So 100% we are now exposed to different parts of clients’ business. There are challenges with indie brands and big brands, and what’s global versus local. So those are the conversations we’re having with clients today in terms of global assets, local assets, the role of micro-influencers, and how one would create analytics out of this. And that has less to do with craft, right? That’s why we’re creating this distance between all the attention to detail we need to make the master assets prime and of the highest quality, and then automation, which is a completely different beast. The resources are different, the teams involved are different, and I think those two things can co-exist.
LBB> I’d love to ask your perspective on AI because that localisation really lends itself to AI. Where 2023 felt like the year of experimentation and 2024 seems to have been a bit more pragmatic in its focus on how it can really be applied, what are clients really comfortable with etc.?
Lalita> 2023 was a novelty and everybody was playing around. Now it’s part of the workflow, and what tools you use depends on the workflow. We’re becoming a little bit like R&D for clients, because we keep testing things that are coming to the marketplace and then we decide which ones we’re going to use in which part of the production process. That part is exciting.
We believe in an agnostic pipeline. What do I mean by that? We don’t want to be attached to one specific system, because it keeps evolving. We prefer to be in the forefront of testing and adopting the tools that make sense by client – and each vertical is different! Work for automotive is different, it’s different for beauty, it’s different for consumer packaged goods, it’s different for banking.
LBB> And where are the places in production where the promise of AI and the reality are not really there yet?
Lalita> Some people want to just click a button and everything is automated. It’s not like that at all, right? Thank God – we still need a lot of humans! With quality assurance, we need to make sure we’re following brand guidelines for clients, so there is a human element of making sure that things are on track and that we’re also delivering in terms of creative quality. It’s not magic, it’s not like that at all.
LBB> Changing gear, I know you are very involved with The Fireflies Tour, which is such a brilliant corner of the production community that raises money through cycling! How did you get involved there and why is it so important to you?
Lalita> There were two people in the production community in Los Angeles who invited me. One was Lucy Herzog, she’s a producer, and the other was Jim Bouvet from Radical Media.
I was a BMX racer when I was a teenager, and then I did triathlons for a period of time. But after having my second child, I actually was not on a bike for quite a long time. It got to a point where I was really keen to find community in LA. So, I got involved and I fell completely in love with it, pretty intensely. I was involved every year until this year. I rode the Alps, I rode San Francisco to LA for many, many years I volunteered, and in 2023 I was the Directeur Sportif – and you can imagine doing that on top of your full time job. I had three amazing producers and it’s all volunteer-based with the goal of raising money for cancer charities.
This year, we lost Philip Detchmendy and Nicky Barnes. She was at Somesuch and then she was at Stink. We were very close so it was pretty hard. It just happened a few weeks ago. She was a Firefly, and it’s galvanising the LA community to celebrate her life. One in every two people will be affected by cancer, that’s an awful, awful number. So, for me, it matters a lot and we’ve raised over $3 million.
LBB> And more generally, what else keeps you inspired and fueled outside of work?
Lalita> People know me probably as an extravert, but what I’ve learned in time is that I’m the most creative in solitude. That’s why I think cycling is such a part of my life. I’ve had the best ideas when I was cycling. Even though you’re in a cycling group, you have those moments where you’re alone.
I’ve been learning quite a lot about ice hockey as well, because I have a daughter who plays hockey. It’s something that I knew zero about, but now I’m learning through her.
And then there’s anything related to art, food, having a community and being connected to my friends. They always inspire me because they do different things. I try to spend as much time as possible with the people that challenge me and create this community.
