‘A trader won’t need to leave our platform’: PMG builds its own CTV buying platform

“We’re A/B testing now, making sure it’s driving better performance for them [the three clients],” said Paladino.

It’s a reaction to what CTV has become: fragmented supply, dubious sellers and platform rules that force agencies to choose between scale and clarity. PMG got tired of that trade off, said Paladino. It couldn’t find a DSP that hit the right mix of efficiency, control and transparency, he added. So they built their own alternative.

“With the CTV ecosystem getting more fragmented, we were struggling to find a platform that gave us the efficiency, control and transparency that we wanted so we decided to build it ourselves,” said Paladino.

On paper, the result sounds like a demand-side platform – the kind of system tech companies usually build when they want marketers transacting directly through them. Paladino didn’t push back on that framing, which makes sense. Like a DSP, Alli Buying Cloud taps into ad servers such as Magnite’s SpringServe and Comcast’s FreeWheel to exert more control over how and what it buys. 

Unlike a DSP, it also pipes into Google’s buying platform, since that’s the only route into YouTube’s programmatic inventory. Amazon is the other major endpoint, though it doesn’t fence off its inventory from outside buying platforms.

What PMG has assembled is less a pure DSP and more a hybrid system – one designed to give the agency more control over a marketplace that hasn’t been giving marketers much of it.

“Long-term, a trader won’t need to leave our platform to go manage campaigns,” said Paladino.

Disruptive as that may sound, Paladino stressed it isn’t intended as a direct replacement for traditional DSPs. Instead, it’s another option, not a mandate. Still, agencies don’t invest the time and money required to build technology like this if they expect to remain big players.

“From a CTV perspective, if you’re going to be buying anything that can be bought in any DSP, it’ll make the most sense to buy it through Alli Buyer Cloud,” said Paladino.

That argument hinges on access to those ad servers. Through FreeWheel and Springserve, PMG can see gradual detail on where CTV impressions are running, including the program, timing and key contextual and device signals. That visibility lets the agency curate inventory upstream before it’s activated at scale, helping avoid the familiar CTV mismatch Palandino flagged – the difference between buying Paramount+ and ending up on Pluto. 

“What’s nice about CTV is 80% or so of inventory is really served from two publisher ad servers [SpringServe and FreeWheel] and we’re connected to those curation tools,” said Palidino.

Getting that level of insight is far harder from the biggest platforms. Google and Amazon provide just enough log-level data to measure gripe while keeping pricing power and auction mechanics firmly obscured. It’s a point marketers have raised repeatedly with little to show for it.

Walking the transparency talk

Over time, PMG expects Alli Buyer Cloud to be used to buy other forms of supply beyond CTV. But Paladino was careful to frame that expansion narrowly. This isn’t a land grab he said, but a precision tool aimed at the most opaque parts of the market. That only works if the platform can secure the log-level data needed to understand what it’s buying. Without that visibility, Alli Buyer Cloud loses the edge PMG is betting on.

That framing resonates, at least on paper. As marketers push more budget into CTV, the lack of transparency there is shifting from a lingering annoyance to a material concern. Less than one in three of the 100 senior B2B marketers (28%) surveyed by Rakuten in the U.K. over the summer said they are very confident that their CTV ads run in fully viewable, fraud-free environments. Nearly all of them (97%) said they were concerned about transparency.

“With so much money being spent on CTV now, agencies and advertisers are becoming much more savvy,” said Chris Edwards, senior director of media at Rakuten Advertising.

Looking back to 2019, when Alli launched, a buying platform feels obvious in hindsight. At the time, it was a proprietary marketing intelligence tool designed to unify data. Since then it has expanded into an AI-powered, open operating system that lets marketers plug in and test a growing roster of third-party martech tools. Along the way, it’s become a meaningful point of difference for PMG and one that’s helped the agency land some of its biggest accounts.

The question now is whether the Alli Buyer Cloud follows the same arc, particularly as marketers get more serious about CTV.