Dallas-based independent media agency PMG has come a long way since it was founded by George Popstefanov in 2010. 

PMG posted revenue growth of 20% in 2025 and managed $7 billion in media spend across offices in the United States, Europe and Latin America. It now has 1,000 employees and a 90% retention rate for both clients and employees over five years. 

Over the past year, the agency also attracted a handful of well-regarded senior (and now former) holding company executives including Leah Meranus, senior vice president, customer success; Josh Krichefski, president, Europe, The Middle East & Africa; Chad Stoller, global head of media; Andrea Terrassa, Chief Operating Officer; Suraj Gandhi, global head of content & studio; and Matt Dailey, head of analytics, EMEA. 

While those stats and appointments are impressive, that’s not why PMG is receiving MediaPost’s 2025 Independent Agency of the Year Award.  

The agency has earned the award for its standout ability to innovate — a pillar of MediaPost’s AOY criteria, along with industry leadership and vision — during a year defined by disruption across the advertising and marketing landscape, buffeted by consolidation, macroeconomic uncertainty and the promise and confusion created by artificial intelligence. 

With more than a third of its staff comprised of engineers, innovation is part of the agency’s DNA. This is the third time in the last five years that MediaPost has named PMG to its AOY roster. 

Two innovations by the agency this year stood out, including a new app store-like interface that enables marketer clients to install an array of martech applications into their tech stacks.

The other was the integration of a retail and media intelligence platform into its proprietary Alli operating system. That system — which full-service clients license as part of an SaaS subscription model — has been evolving since its introduction in 2013. 

The first-of-its-kind app store, dubbed the Alli Marketplace, effectively gives marketers a plug-and-play ecosystem for popular and emerging technology applications.  

"It works just like a consumer app store -- specifically designed this way so that the interface would be simple and intuitive to any iPhone/Android user who has ever downloaded an app from an app store," explained PMG Head of Product Crissi Cupak, when the product was unveiled at the Cannes Lions creative festival in June.  

As with consumer app stores, some apps may be free while others will have a price, according to the agency. 

At launch, the marketplace featured 29 “foundational partners” across data, AI, and measurement, including Amazon, Attain, Blis, Comscore, Disney, EDO, Experian, Freewheel, Google, iHeart Media, Innovid, LG Ads, LiftLab, LinkedIn, LiveRamp, Magnite, Mobian, NBCUniversal, Prisma, Reddit, Roku, Samsung Ads, Simulmedia, Snap, TikTok, Truthset, Vidmob, and Vistar Media. 

The agency said it will be adding additional partners to the marketplace, but was not ready to provide an update at deadline.   

One example of how clients are using the marketplace: CKE Restaurants used it in a recent campaign to quickly connect with MediaOcean to streamline how they reviewed offline media performance. The PMG account team built a certified view that pulled linear radio and TV data at the estimate level, giving planners clear line of sight into ad spend and delivery. 

The implementation also enabled the team to add a status field to compare planned versus actual investments and create daily values to track pacing more accurately. The upshot: CKE was provided a single view of performance and improved decision making across the campaign.  

The second standout innovation was the expansion of the Alli operating system by way of a new data connection to “Velocity,” the retail media and commerce intelligence platform developed by Momentum Commerce, which PMG acquired in June.  

Calling it a “major tech milestone,” the agency says the connection provides brands with a single connected view of how every marketing dollar drives every sale, from marketplaces and direct-to-consumer sites to retail and in-store performance.  

The new connection also unlocks a new generation of AI-enabled capabilities across both platforms, including AI-summarized retail analytics, AI-driven market and competitive insights, persona-based media planning for retail media networks such as Amazon DSP, and generative dashboards for automated performance reporting. 

John Shea, Head of Commerce for PMG, said that “With Velocity inside Alli, we’re uniting retail signals with omnichannel activation. And through AI-enabled capabilities, we’re putting those insights directly into the hands of every marketer.” 

Velocity tracks more than 37 million products and 880,000 brands across Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, and other retail platforms. The integration with Alli links marketplace sales intelligence from commerce platforms directly to the point of media activation. 

According to the agency, one of its clients in the fitness category used Velocity in Alli to monitor near real time shifts in product sales and “add-to-cart" activity during Cyber Week. By pulling the most current Amazon signals twice daily the account team spotted emerging trends quickly and was able to correlate changes in demand with active marketing efforts and improving decisions throughout the period.  

While the app-store development and Velocity integrations put the agency over the top for the MediaPost AOY award, the agency cited numerous other advances in 2025 across audience planning, generative dashboards, the Alli Creative Engine and more, reinforcing the agency’s innovation, vision and leadership credentials.