Alissa Hansen: Beyond The Production Line

Alissa Hansen has always been interested in what happens between the idea and the audience. That instinct has shaped her nearly two decades at Omnicom. A career that has taken her from the improvisational early days of digital production to building studios, developing technology platforms, and now leading Omnicom Production’s North American operation.

Hansen began her career as a producer. At Omnicom-owned Critical Mass, she built and scaled studio capabilities in the digital era (building its first live-action studio) before becoming its first chief production officer. Later, she moved into a chief product officer role at Omnicom, where she helped shape the technology and systems behind content at scale. And it is that combination – a production background grounded in making things happen, alongside an understanding of technology and product development - that brought her to her current role.

Omnicom Production was launched as a global practice area in June 2024, led by global CEO Sergio Lopez, as clients faced a rapidly changing demand for content across platforms and channels. Hansen was appointed CEO of North America, with Mariusz Urbanczyk, formerly Publicis Groupe’s global chief client officer for production, named CEO of UK and EMEA.

“Sergio understood that I had both a traditional production background rooted in the digital era and this newer technology-product perspective,” Hansen says. “Combined with my long tenure at Omnicom, it felt like a natural progression into Omnicom Production, because I wanted to influence this whole new way of working on a much larger canvas.”

A producer at heart

Ask Hansen to describe herself and she doesn't reach for the language of leadership or innovation. “I’m a producer at heart, that’s my background,” she says. It's a simple answer, but it explains much of what has followed. Production has been the thread running through her career, from the early days of digital to leading Omnicom Production in North America.

And it's a revealing description. Even as production today is being reshaped by automation, AI, and the demand for more content, Hansen’s thinking remains rooted in craft: an understanding of what needs to happen to make an idea work. Her career began in a very different landscape, when teams were often building ambitious work with limited resources. “I spent all those years really building a studio and scaling a studio in the digital space,” she says. “Growing up in the early 2000s, we had shoe-string budgets, and I remember the piggyback shoots with the large agency of records, but we had large-scale ambition.”

Those constraints became a kind of training ground. “That kind of environment required me to learn how to stretch and be very spontaneous in how we brought ideas together. We worked with in-house studios before we called them in-house studios, worked with near-shore teams before we called them near-shore teams — it was just part of being in that early digital era and always inventing.”

That instinct of finding new ways around old limitations stayed with her as the demands on brands began to change. A few years before the pandemic, Hansen noticed clients were asking for something very different. Not just campaigns, but many more versions of content designed to work across increasingly personalised media environments. “We started getting really challenging briefs around how to create more versions,” she explains.

The problem was not creative ambition. It was the practical reality of scale. “There simply aren’t enough human hours to sustain that level of output without burning out teams or overextending budgets.” The answer was not simply to make production faster — it was to rethink how content was created, organised, and delivered. That thinking led to ArtBot, Omnicom Production’s intelligent content automation product, and to Hansen’s broader focus on how technology can support creativity rather than replace it.

For years, production had often been treated as the final step in advertising. The part that happened after the idea had already been decided. When asked whether production had historically been the “dirty cousin” of advertising, Hansen laughs. “I’m laughing at your ‘dirty cousin’ comment because it’s true,” she says. “I remember pitches where production would appear at the very end under a slide saying ‘here’s how we get it done,’ and we’d be lucky if there were five minutes left because the creative team (God love them) had taken up 40 minutes of a 30-minute presentation.”

The distinction, she says, is that production is not just about getting things made. “Production was often viewed as a logistics function, and producers are — and still are — deeply tactical. Producers are wired to solve problems.”

She believes clients today are asking for something broader. “What’s changing now is that clients aren’t just asking for production anymore but instead they’re asking for content. Production is evolving into content experiences.”

Connected Content

That shift in thinking sits behind Hansen’s focus on Connected Content. It's an approach, she explains, built around a simple observation: audiences no longer experience brands in neat, linear stages.

The old model of marketing was easier to map. A creative idea was developed, a campaign was launched, media carried it into the world, and results were measured afterwards. But people are moving differently today. “Previously, agencies operated in silos — creative agencies, media agencies, PR agencies, social agencies, digital agencies. That model worked when the customer journey was simpler. Now CMOs are under enormous pressure to deliver measurable value. They’re asking for orchestration and how strategy flows into creative platforms, into content execution, into media and ultimately into performance," Hansen says.

Her own experience looking for a dress for Cannes Lions Festival is a good example of how unpredictable that journey has become. She did not begin with a retailer. She started with TikTok. Looking for something to wear, she searched for an “Amazon dress Cannes”, then refined it further with “Amazon dress South of France”. She found a creator whose style matched what she was looking for, but the journey did not end there. The creator’s storefront did not link directly to the product, so Hansen took a screenshot, uploaded it to ChatGPT, and asked it to find the item. From there, she bought the dress on Amazon Prime — all while sitting on a flight.

It is a small, everyday example of a much bigger change: discovery, inspiration, search, and purchase are no longer separate moments. They happen across platforms, often guided by content created by people other than the brand itself. “But that’s a fragmented consumer journey,” she says. “And the reality is consumers now expect brands to show up fluidly across all those moments.”

For Hansen, the challenge for marketers is not simply creating more content, but these three things. 1) Understanding where content needs to exist. 2) What role it needs to play. 3) How it connects with everything around it.

“Content is a force multiplier when it’s deployed in the right places." That idea is also shaping the way Omnicom Production is working with the wider Omnicom network, particularly around the relationship between creative, media and technology.

Globally, the business now sits within Omnicom Content Experiences (OCX), with Connected Content at the heart of its ambition: bringing together the different parts of the marketing ecosystem around the way audiences actually behave. “It’s not about fewer agencies; it’s about deeper integration. It’s about making all those functions work together in a connected system.” One area where that thinking is becoming particularly important is streaming. Omnicom Production is working with partners including NBCUniversal, Netflix, and Disney on new approaches to content within connected TV — a space where the technology has moved faster than the advertising experience.

“The current experience is frankly embarrassing,” Hansen says. “You binge an episodic series and see the exact same ad over-and-over again. Research showed us that 80 per cent of consumers believe a bad ad experience is worse than no ad at all."

Together with colleagues across Omnicom Media Group, including chief product officer Megan Pagliuca and chief intelligence officer Joanna O’Connell, Hansen has been exploring how better creative systems and better media intelligence can work together. The opportunity, she adds, is not just to place advertising more effectively, but to make the experience itself better for audiences.

“We can create dynamic assets all day long, but unless there’s a connected media fulfilment system, none of it works,” she says.

For Hansen, that is where the next phase of production becomes interesting: not replacing the craft of storytelling, but allowing stories to travel further, respond faster, and become much more relevant.

Marketing, she argues, is becoming more systems-driven. The challenge is no longer simply reaching people at scale, but building brands that can recognise signals, respond to them, and keep the conversation moving through content that adapts in real time. "What’s interesting is that marketers are only responsible for creating a portion of those signals now. Creators, communities, culture, and conversations generate signals too. Our role is to connect and amplify them. The brands that succeed will be the ones that understand how to create momentum around those signals, rather than simply broadcasting campaigns into the world."

The producer’s instinct for what comes next

Hansen’s optimism about where the industry is heading is striking, particularly at a time when many conversations around AI are dominated by uncertainty. She does not dismiss the disruption. She simply sees it through a different lens. “Completely optimistic. You have to be.”

For Hansen, this is not the first time the industry has been forced to rethink how it works. Digital changed production. Social changed distribution. Data changed measurement. AI is the latest tool to arrive, and the question is what people choose to do with it.

“There’s a narrative around centralisation and AI replacing people, but I actually think our responsibility as leaders is to create environments that are future-proof and create opportunities for new talent,” she says. She believes the creative opportunity lies in expanding what people can make, rather than narrowing it.

“I often say that if you had given Michelangelo more colours, he would have just painted more masterpieces.” It is a typically Hansen way of looking at technology: less as a threat to creativity and more as another instrument for creative people to use.

“What we’re doing now is helping people understand where the industry is going,” she says. “Connected assets, compound value, content systems — these ideas aren’t mainstream yet, but you can see people starting to understand them.”

That belief in possibility has perhaps been a constant throughout her career. The tools have changed, but the instinct has remained the same: understand what people need, then figure out how to make it possible.

It may also explain why, outside advertising, Hansen’s creative outlet has always been music.

Before entering the industry, she was a classically trained professional musician in Chicago. Her first advertising salary came not from a production studio but as a jingle artist, creating music for brands including Red Lobster and McDonald’s. “I come from a music background,” she says. “Classical music will always stay with me.”

Today, the space she finds most exciting is one where all her interests seem to meet: storytelling, technology, audiences, and creativity. "I’m obsessed with the potential of content inside streaming environments,” she says.

Connected TV may currently be thought of as a media channel, but Hansen sees a much bigger opportunity. As the chance to create experiences that people genuinely want to spend time with. “The reality is that when people are in entertainment mode, the last thing they want is a traditional ad. So the challenge is simple: let’s make them better.”

It is an ambition that feels consistent with the career she has built: not chasing the next technology for its own sake, but looking for the moment where a new possibility meets a human need.

For Hansen, production has never just been about making things. It has always been about finding what could happen next.