Tech, Data, and More Big Questions Answered by PMG’s Head of Technology Chris Alvares

In the latest installment of our Big Questions series, we caught up with our Head of Technology Chris Alvares to better understand how his team continuously innovates PMG’s proprietary Alli technology and what industry challenges he’s focused on solving.

The easy answer here is consumer privacy, how advertisers engage in a cookieless world, and how to mitigate the challenges marketers will face by removing those user signals along the customer journey. While many are still in search of a cookie replacement, the opportunity is in using technology and first-party data to build better engagement between brands and people. 

In marketing technology, and with Alli specifically, we are looking at opportunities to break down the walls between data, technology, and creative. Historically, creative was associated with traditional media and then adapted for digital. Full integration between creative and digital strategies using technology is the future. It’s certainly not an easy problem to solve, and every brand is different, but we’re hoping that by making data more accessible, we can bridge the gaps to empower better creative and brand engagement with more data-driven decisions. 

This is a shameless plug, but our marketing intelligence platform Alli is in an incredible position right now. We’re focusing on tackling some really interesting and industry-defining challenges, and our hope is that we can use technology to push the industry and marketers in the right, privacy-focused direction. My favorite Alli capability right now is our Creative Insights feature, which is our company’s first foray into computer vision and machine learning. The best part is that the solution we’re designing keeps user privacy at the forefront for the brands that will use this feature. 

In everything we do on the product side of PMG, we want to make sure our teams have an environment where they’re able to experiment, take risks, and ultimately contribute to work they’re proud of. When we approach product development and design at PMG, we like to think of each product manager as if they are the CEO of their product. They are there to help serve their customers as well as empower our engineering team to make the best decisions for the business. Enabling new opportunities and professional development for our engineering teams is a huge focus of mine, as I truly believe our engineers and technologists are the biggest competitive advantage to our company.