CANNES – Artificial intelligence continues to redefine modern marketing, and digital advertising agency PMG is doubling down on its belief that the future lies in platforms, not just partnerships. That vision is taking shape in the form of Alli Marketplace, a new martech exchange announced this week that is embedded directly into PMG’s proprietary operating system, Alli.
The implications extend far beyond automation, said Sam Bloom, PMG’s head of partnerships.
In this wide-ranging interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Bloom detailed how AI is fundamentally reshaping the brand-agency dynamic: unlocking new creative insights, dismantling silos and aligning storytelling with performance outcomes.
“At PMG, our view is that our platform Alli is a massive enabler for marketers,” Bloom said. “We can bring in a lot of tech and data that marketers can’t bring inside their four walls. But we believe we can bring structure, context and unified data, enabling us to build different applications that connect client proprietary data with third-party data sets.”
From automation to insight
While AI’s productivity gains are well known, Bloom emphasized that its real value lies in generating insights previously out of reach.
“You can take a video and process it through AI, and it can deduce content suitability, tonality — things the human eye can’t do,” he said. “Imagine applying that across YouTube’s top channels and aligning content accordingly. Humans couldn’t do that before. Now we can.”
These capabilities, Bloom said, let PMG to evaluate creative and audience performance in ways that go far beyond basic metrics.
“We can score creative. We can score audiences. The processing power and contextualized data just wasn’t there before,” he said.
Role of Alli Marketplace
This week’s launch of Alli Marketplace marks a major expansion of PMG’s platform strategy. The new martech app exchange — described by the company as “a first-of-its-kind” — is designed to help brands activate technology directly within their planning and execution workflows.
“Alli is more than a platform; it’s the operating system for modern marketing,” said Chris Alvares, PMG’s vice president of AI and technology, in a company statement.
Unlike traditional app stores or partner directories, Alli Marketplace enables real-time experimentation, allowing marketers to toggle on apps — ranging from audience enrichment to creative generation — with a single click, directly inside the Alli environment.
Alli Marketplace already features 29 foundational partners, including giants Amazon, TikTok, Snap, Disney, Google Cloud, Roku and LiveRamp. PMG plans to double that number within six months.
Breaking down creative silos
For Bloom, AI isn’t just a media tool. It’s increasingly vital to how creative is evaluated and deployed.
“Creative was always very subjective,” he said. “I’m not saying the human element isn’t important. But objective data about creative—data only AI can provide—is a huge lever. It lets us apply those insights to campaigns more effectively.”
Unified, contextualized data, he added, is what allows PMG to connect media performance with creative development.
“We’re seeing AI cross both creative and media areas because we’ve now found some language that connects the two.”
Storytelling meets performance
PMG’s use of clean taxonomies and structured data is helping it bridge the long-standing gap between upper-funnel brand storytelling and lower-funnel performance metrics.
“It’s not one story. It’s a larger story,” Bloom said. “And it may be a connected story, if you will.”
By analyzing how users move through the funnel, from awareness to conversion, PMG is able to map creative and media effectiveness across stages, he added.
Filtering the signal from the noise
With AI surfacing endless data points, Bloom emphasized that a core agency responsibility is helping brands focus on what truly drives results.
“At the end of the day, we’re obsessed with helping clients with outcomes,” he said. “Trying to correlate things that don’t drive outcomes: you’re just talking to yourself at that point.”
He added: “Everybody wants performance. Everybody wants results. That’s the music we’re all dancing to.”
Scalable model for martech
Beyond clients, Alli Marketplace also promises a more open, frictionless ecosystem for media and technology partners. PMG handles integration, billing and discovery, offering usage reporting and direct product feedback. In a bold move, the company is making the Alli specification open-source, enabling others to replicate the model in their own platforms.
As Bloom and Alvares both suggest, the future of marketing isn’t just about more data. It’s about using that data (cleanly, intelligently and in real time) to connect ideas, systems and people across the entire value chain.
And with Alli Marketplace, PMG is betting that modular, AI-powered infrastructure, not just messaging, is what will keep brands ahead in a chaotic and fast-moving digital economy.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2025, presented by PMG. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2025 here.
