The open web gets the budgets. The gated web gets the conversations. Kaaveh Shoamanesh, CEO of Plaiced, and his team have spent the past four years building the infrastructure to move more of those budgets into the spaces brands consistently miss.

After 21 years of placing brands inside selected television and film productions, Kaaveh identified a structural gap that he says Meta and Google had never solved: the most high-intent audiences on the internet were gathering inside private groups, niche apps, newsletters, Substack, Reddit groups, and Discord servers that legacy ad networks couldn’t reach. In 2021, he founded Plaiced to change that.

The Los Angeles and Toronto-based company operates as an ad network for online communities, offering brands access to more than 50,000 curated communities that engage with 500 million high-interest people. Its client roster includes Sony Pictures, L’Oréal, Disney, Omnicom, NBCUniversal, and WPP. 

“Your audience is in communities,” Kaaveh says. “Your media plan isn’t.”

Plaiced has built a real-time causal measurement system designed to show brands not just whether a campaign is working, but why, and when to reallocate budget before it goes to waste.

The Problem With Advertising Where Everyone Already Is

Most brand media spend chases audiences across the open web: the public-facing feeds of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Kaaveh argues this is the less intentional half of the digital ecosystem.

The more valuable half, what he calls the “gated web,” sits behind logins, memberships, and private group walls: mom apps, sports fan clubs, gaming Discord servers, faith-based newsletters, and hundreds of other niche spaces where people self-identify around specific interests. These are the environments, he says, that legacy ad networks have never been able to sell.

“If you advertise through Kim Kardashian targeting moms, she’s probably a great mom, but not everyone follows her because she’s a mom,” Kaaveh notes. “A lot of wasted money is being spent in environments that are not the exact target.”

Inside a gated community, membership is the signal. A user in a mom-only app has self-verified as a mom. A subscriber to a “Survivor” fan newsletter is almost certainly a reality TV viewer. That specificity is what Plaiced is selling. “We are already in the foundation of what they want,” Kaaveh says. “We’re already in the group that’s already talking about what you want to sell them.”

Plaiced’s figures put the engagement gap in direct terms: communities drive engagement rates above 10%, compared to a 1.8% average across social media. Research cited by the company finds that 84% of consumers trust community recommendations over brand advertising, and 92% trust peer recommendations over traditional ads.

Creators and Communities Aren’t Competing. But They’re Not the Same.

Brands often arrive at Plaiced asking whether community advertising replaces Influencer Marketing. Kaaveh’s answer is no. But the structural difference is significant: where creators are a conduit to an audience, Plaiced already holds the audience.

“Creators are one transportation mechanism,” he says. “A billboard is another one, a TV commercial is another. They’re using as many conduits as they can to get to their audience. Whereas in our case, we already have the audience.”

The practical implication: a creator brings their follower base, which may or may not match a brand’s target customer. Community membership is self-selected, making the audience match structural rather than probabilistic.

Kaaveh also flags an adjacent problem. “Brands have cracked the code on producing great creator-branded assets,” he says, “but the industry default is to just throw those assets into legacy social platform ad networks. That is a legacy move.” 

According to him, well-produced creator content underperforms when funneled through saturated open feeds. The same asset, placed inside an active community conversation, functions as a peer recommendation rather than an interruption.

The Measurement Gap Plaiced Is Targeting

Plaiced launched a real-time marketing mix modeling tool at CES in January, designed to surface causal relationships in media spend as a campaign runs, not after it ends.

For Kaaveh, the distinction between attribution and causation matters. Attribution tells a brand which channel a conversion was last associated with. Causation/incrementality identifies which channel actually drove the result, and when that channel began delivering diminishing returns.

“You know exactly what is happening, why it’s happening, when it’s happening, and how to predict what to do next,” Kaaveh says. When engagement on a given placement begins to slow, the system automatically reallocates budget to higher-performing communities without manual intervention.

Verification runs through pixel tracking, third-party tags, and a LiveRamp integration that will allow brands to activate campaigns against LiveRamp audience data directly through the platform. “No black box. No self-reported numbers,” Kaaveh says.

What Community Campaigns Actually Look Like

Plaiced’s campaign examples illustrate the range of the inventory. For Sony Pictures’ “Karate Kid: Legends,” the placement ran inside karate and martial arts blogs. For NBC’s “Battlebots,” Plaiced reached French gaming Discord servers to drive YouTube views in France. For “Journey to Bethlehem,” a faith-based film, the buy ran through an archdiocese blog network reaching 226 churches.

For Outback Steakhouse, ads ran in Tampa-area mom groups across Instagram and Facebook properties, using community context rather than demographic inference as the primary filter. For Disney Vacations, a date-night promotion ran inside a couples app, reaching users who had self-identified as being in relationships.

Little Caesars ran a mini-series format commercial within “Survivor” fan groups, matching branded creative to an audience already oriented around elimination-format entertainment. For a Paramount campaign around “Magic: The Gathering,” Plaiced placed picture-in-picture video ads with gaming streamers, including lower-third formats and interactive polls.

“Whether it is mom groups, sports fans, beauty, fitness, or gaming groups, we are tapping into the gated web,” Kaaveh says. “These are high-value environments that legacy social platform ad networks have never been able to sell you.” Three new campaigns are scheduled to launch in May 2026 and will run through Plaiced’s real-time measurement system.

Creative Freedom: The Variable Brands Keep Getting Wrong

Beyond targeting and measurement, Kaaveh identifies a third failure mode in how brands approach community and creator-based advertising: the reluctance to cede creative control.

“Brands are very afraid because of brand safety,” he says. “It’s understandable. But more forward-thinking brands are allowing creative freedom even at the risk of a little brand safety exposure, because it performs better.” Imposing standardized brand assets on community environments risks the same outcome as a corporate post in a neighborhood forum: visible, but unwelcome.

“Imagine they hire someone inside their company and say, ‘You can’t think for yourself, you have to do this,’” he says. “It would never happen in any other business.”

The Two-Year Roadmap

Plaiced’s near-term priorities center on three areas: establishing real-time incrementality as the standard for community media measurement, expanding the community network to cover more intent categories, and ensuring every impression is verified as a real human engagement rather than a self-reported figure.

The company now positions itself not as an alternative to creator marketing but as the infrastructure layer beneath it: a distribution network purpose-built for the audiences brands pay to find but currently miss. The fragmentation of digital advertising, Kaaveh argues, is the structural opportunity. 

“One Instagram influencer will tell you something for analytics and another one will tell you something else,” he says. “Meta ads will tell you this. Google Ads will tell you this. Ours brings everything in one place.”

As Fortune 500 marketing teams reassess where their media spend delivers verifiable return, Plaiced’s thesis is straightforward: the audiences already exist in curated, high-intent environments across the gated web. The question is whether media plans catch up. 

“Zero wasted spend,” Kaaveh says. “That’s the goal.”

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