SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Advertisers must accept that universal data solutions don’t exist, as every dataset contains flaws and limitations that require careful evaluation rather than accepting vendor claims at face value.
“The uncomfortable truth that advertisers finally need to accept is that not everyone can solve all of their problems,” Adam Shlachter, client president at WPP Media, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat San Juan. “We’re living in a day and age where everyone feels they have data or signals or IDs that could help us find every audience that could ever exist for every brand, every marketer, every product, every market.”
This reality demands more serious interrogation of data offerings and recognition that one-size-fits-all approaches fail to address specific brand requirements.
“Premium” requires measurable outcomes
Premium content justification extends beyond inventory safety to measurable business value, considering content quality, format, consumption environment, talent, and genre while ensuring outcomes justify costs including production time and purpose-built creative messaging.
“Premium is a label that I think just gets thrown around a lot to justify either the cost of something or even an opportunity in and of itself,” Shlachter said. “When thinking about the value that it provides, it does come down to how well we understand and can qualify whether or not it has value to the audience we’re trying to reach, the moment that we want to be around, or the position and placement that a brand can have within that content.”
Cross-media measurement reaches reality
Holistic measurement across channels, partners, and formats becomes increasingly achievable through connected infrastructure, standardized data, common methodology, and AI capabilities that process disparate datasets to uncover previously impossible insights.
“We’re finally at a point where measuring things more holistically across channels, across partners, across formats is starting to become much more of a reality,” Shlachter said. “We finally, after decades of talking about it, have gotten to a place where the pipes are connected, the data is becoming more standardized, the methodology is becoming a bit more common.”
This reflects evolving planning and buying approaches that avoid vacuum execution and measurement isolation.
Business objectives beyond vanity metrics
Budget pressure demands measurement approaches focused on actual business objectives rather than engagement or traffic metrics, requiring understanding of measurable business outcomes for planning, modeling, and optimization.
“Ultimately, it comes down to how well we understand a client’s business objectives, and that has to go well beyond vanity metrics,” Shlachter said. “We shouldn’t be looking at things purely in terms of how they drive engagements or traffic alone. We have to look at what the impact is to the actual business.”
AI provides superpowers, not solutions
Artificial intelligence enhances capabilities through accelerated data processing, pattern recognition, and multi-angle analysis rather than serving as a universal problem solver, with effectiveness limited by input data quality and training parameters.
“Where AI can be really powerful is in giving us superpowers. The ability to process data at speeds that we’ve never been able to do on our own, the ability to uncover new insights that the human eye might be able to catch,” Shlachter said.
WPP Open’s agentic workflow operates through Open Intelligence proprietary datasets that discover opportunities, apply market knowledge, optimize performance, and ensure strong business outcomes.
“With WPP Open, our agentic workflow, it’s underpinned by Open Intelligence, which is our proprietary data sets and sources of truth that help us really better understand how to discover new opportunities,” Shlachter said. “If it’s not delivering a strong business outcome, we have to go find new opportunities to make sure that we’re driving that with maximum impact.”
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