• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, October 1, 2007

Manager and Mentor

Elias Plishner 

Senior vice president, director of digital communications, Universal McCann

Few digital shops are as closely associated with a single client as Universal McCann’s Los Angeles arm is with Sony Pictures.
The theatrical group, the home-entertainment group, the TV group and more — UM handles All Things Sony Pictures in the digital space. In the last year alone, the agency has rolled out huge, not to mention hugely well-regarded and received, media campaigns for Spider-Man 3, Casino Royale and, most recently, Superbad.

Elias Plishner, UM senior vice president and director of digital communications, oversees the account. He arrived at the agency as a young ’un, with only a single other professional gig to his name (a stint at an ABC affiliate that he deems “not even worth noting”). Nearly 10 years ago, he founded UM’s digital group with two peers who left the company shortly thereafter. “I learned by being forced into things,” he jokes. He also learned the more traditional way, getting his M.B.A. at USC at night while building the digital practice during the day.

UM snared the Sony Pictures digital business a few years later and hasn’t looked back, growing into one of the larger digital agencies in L.A. As its head, Plishner counts several firsts to his name: Sony Pictures was the first studio on YouTube, and he played a large role in UM’s push to combine its broadcast and digital upfront efforts.

Plishner credits his 15-strong team for the digital team’s successes. “I try to spend 50 percent of my time with my people. I take managing them kind of seriously,” he says. This manifests itself in first-thing-Monday meetings that are more community klatch than hard-core strategy session. “They’re very skill- and industry-specific, as opposed to client-specific. We do negotiation exercises, talk about whoever Google’s buying that week and how it will impact our business — things like that.”

At the same time, Plishner lauds Sony Pictures and UM’s other clients for their open-mindedness “no matter how goofy” ideas may be. “Our clients are incredibly willing to take chances, which is a dream situation for us,” he says. “New programs and ideas don’t get held up in political red tape. The attitude is ‘Let’s try it. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll learn from it.’ ”

In turn, Dwight Caines, executive vice president of worldwide digital marketing at Sony Pictures, would follow Plishner into battle: “He does things the right way and he does right by his people.” Caines also praises Plishner’s grounded-in-fact approach to online media buying. “Most of the people we talked to at first came in with this degree of arrogance — ‘we know the space, here’s what you should be spending.’ Elias, from the beginning, made decisions based on data and the facts. I appreciated that he wasn’t just basing things on his instincts.”

Plishner clearly loves his current role: “um is really the only place I’ve known. It’s in my blood.” That said, he hopes eventually to parlay his digital facility and business acumen into a gig as the head of marketing for a Fortune 500 company. “I’ve spent a lot of time this year focused on other media besides digital — on creative, on publicity, on promotions, on international marketing,” he says. “But I still think people in digital have a humongous advantage. We know where media and marketing is heading, and I want to be a part of that.”