Data Is Everywhere. Intelligence Is Not: In The Know with PMG’s Mike Treon

In the Know is a series that spotlights industry leaders sharing the ideas, strategies, and real-world insights driving meaningful impact in market. At Cannes 2026, InMarket sat down with Mike Treon, Head of CTV & Video Strategy at PMG, to talk about the shift from data to intelligence and why orchestrating across channels and agents is becoming the industry’s next competitive edge. These key themes stood out:

Small bets, big learnings beat one big swing.

Mike has spent close to 20 years on both sides of the media business, starting at Advertising.com and moving through AOL’s Oath platform before six years on the agency side, first at Camelot and now at PMG. That vantage point shaped how he thinks brands should move through a market changing faster than any stretch he’s seen.

Business transformation doesn’t go from A to B, but has iterations in between. And that test-and-learn, and being able to put a little risk out there in a lot of places. I think brands that are doing that, placing a lot of small bets and gathering a lot of big learnings, are going to be set up.

The pace backs up the urgency: by his read, the last six to 12 months have moved faster than any comparable window in his 20 years in the industry. In that environment, agility isn’t one strategy among many. It’s the only one that keeps up.

The real unlock isn’t more data. It’s intelligence.

Mike sees media becoming less a bulk campaign exercise and more a segmentation problem, one LLMs are starting to help brands solve by pulling structure out of raw data. But he draws a hard line between having data and having something you can act on.

It’s not really this quest for data, it’s a quest for intelligence. Data is everywhere, but intelligence is not. And building that layer to be able to make quick decisions and pivot, you need intelligence there, not just the data flowing in.

For Mike, that starts with contextualizing the data itself: making clear what a line item actually means versus an ad tag, since most marketers don’t have that depth into what makes up a campaign. Translate that jargon into plain language, and it becomes usable by anyone on the team, not just the person who wrote the original query or ran the campaign. That’s when intelligence stops sitting with a handful of specialists and starts getting shared broadly. 

It’s also why Mike sees the barrier to acting on data (once needing to write good SQL, now something far more accessible) changing not just who gets access, but the entire rhythm of measurement: “It’s not, ‘let’s put the tags up on this campaign and wait till it ends and make decisions.’ It’s, ‘What does the real-time collaborative environment look like?’” That environment looks less like handing over a full data set and more like building something together, whether that’s a clean room or agent-to-agent communication, in smaller, more frequent exchanges across a media organization.

Intelligence only matters if it reaches the CFO, too.

The last mile for Mike isn’t a dashboard. It’s a conversation that used to happen only in specialist language, translated for the people who control the budget.

Think about how we contextualize for a CMO, doing it in data that’s transparent, and [that] they understand. I think there’s a lot of broader opportunity for unlocking value and lessen[ing] this divide between magic science over here and the art of marketing over here. There’s a much more common language coming into play there.

Closing the divide between “magic science” and “the art of marketing,” as he puts it, is what lets a CMO walk into a room with a CFO and speak in outcomes instead of jargon.

Orchestration is the theme he’s betting will stick.

When asked for the one idea from this year he expects to matter most next, Mike didn’t hesitate.

Orchestration has been in my mind. How do we design for omnichannel and orchestrate what we’re doing in social with what happens in TV? Or what an influencer is doing in real life?

That includes the agentic layer, too: an InMarket agent working alongside an inventory forecasting agent, correlating signals and simplifying decisions across every persona in a media buying organization. When he heard about InMarket’s own intelligence layer, Maestro, built to orchestrate exactly that kind of coordination, his reaction summed up the whole conversation: “It’s an orchestra.”

How that shows up in the work

Across every theme, Mike’s throughline was the same: data alone doesn’t move a brand forward; intelligence does, and it only counts if it reaches the people making decisions, from the practitioner to the CFO. That’s the same discipline InMarket’s Outcome Intelligence and Maestro are built around, turning raw signal into something a whole organization can act on, together.

Watch the full conversation from Cannes 2026 here. Connect with our team to see how InMarket can help you build custom, outcome-driven measurement for your brand—get in touch at InMarket.com/Contact.