CANNES – As artificial intelligence reshapes marketing, PMG’s proprietary technology platform, Alli, is putting speed and automation at the center of campaign strategy, says Chris Alvares, the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence and technology.
Speaking to Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Alvares said Alli stands apart from other marketing platforms because “it’s one utilized by 100% of PMG customers.”
“When you onboard onto PMG, Alli is one of the first things that gets integrated within 24 hours,” Alvares said. “There’s a system enabled for you and it’s also vertically integrated across the board.”
PMG at Cannes Lions unveiled Alli Marketplace, which PMG describes as a “first-of-its-kind” martech app exchange that lets brands integrate and activate technology seamlessly within their campaign planning and execution processes. The platform 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.
Alvares said Alli’s development has been ongoing for 15 years, with PMG building its own data foundation, pipelines, and features.
“Everything is vertically integrated, meaning we can move very, very quickly for our customers with speed and agility,” he said.
Blurring lines between marketers and engineers
As AI tools like Alli take on more technical functions, the traditional divide between marketing and engineering teams is eroding.
“I actually think they’re coming closer together,” Alvares said. “Some of the best marketers are actually engineers by trade and some of the best engineers are actually marketers first. So I think there’s a fusion of them.”
He pointed to the rise of generative AI as a catalyst.
“We’ve seen more marketers leverage things like ChatGPT to write marketing technology code and deploy them out using things like Alli Workflows, which is our automation tool, than we’ve ever seen before,” Alvares said. “It’s sort of coming together almost in a beautiful way.”
Real-time creative optimization
One of Alli’s most impactful features, according to Alvares, is its Creative Insights platform, which allows for near-instant adjustments to campaigns based on performance data.
For example, during the critical Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping period, PMG used Alli to analyze creative performance in real time.
“The teams were actually able to see the top performing creative and the bottom performing creative,” Alvares said.
That insight was immediately shared with creative teams, who optimized messaging on the fly.
“When creative is not working, they’re able to go in, automate it, automatically control that creative and change that messaging to improve performance in a very crucial time for a business,” he added.
Future of martech won’t come from Big Tech
Looking ahead, Alvares predicted that the next wave of marketing technology innovation is unlikely to originate from large, established players.
“I think the next big market technology is not going to come from a large business,” he said. “I think it’s going to come from two people in their basements or in their garages just building software and using AI technology.”
PMG’s Alli Marketplace was designed with that reality in mind.
“It’s to enable both large advertisers as well as up and coming startups and everyone in between to be able to integrate into the Alli platform to help our businesses and to help our customers really, really drive that with speed and agility,” Alvares said.
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