Having recently passed the three year mark of his ITV tenure, Mclachlan, ITV's Director of Advanced Advertising, has been at the very heart of ITV's digital transformation. Mclachlan has been instrumental in the establishment and continued success of Planet V, which was launched with considerable fanfare in October 2020. Planet V is the UK's 2nd largest programmatic video platform, accounting for in excess of 95% of ITV's digital ad revenues. Having normalised Planet V for ad buyers in the UK, Mclachlan has more recently turned his attention to securing additional broadcasters for the platform, the first of which, STV, was announced in January 2023, and Mclachlan has made several very public statements regarding their aspirations and intentions to add further UK and European broadcasters in 2023.

In addition to Planet V, Mclachlan manages ITV's groundbreaking 'Adlabs' innovation unit, responsible for the development and incubation of progressive ad formats. Since its inception in Autumn 2021, Adlabs has pushed out a plethora of new ad concepts, ranging from dynamic creative and real-time weather targeting, to the more recent highly publicized groundbreaking retail-media product 'Matchmaker', developed in collaboration with Boots, Tesco-Dunnhumby and Infosum.

Prior to joining ITV, Mclachlan spent eight years running global business development at the spectacularly icarus-like Videology. He began his career as ‘the barman’, pouring pints in the media watering hole, The Carpenters arm, from where he was hired from behind the bar to become a TV buyer at McCann-Erickson, where he stayed for nearly eight years, before joining MediaCom in late 2003.

Never shy of expressing an opinion and extending a rallying cry for the TV industry, Mclachlan is a popular speaker at the various conferences and Chatham house sessions he attends.