A competitor’s product goes out of stock on Walmart.com at 2am. By the time a media team checks a dashboard the next morning, the moment is gone. Shoppers who would have bought a substitute have already moved on.
That’s what happens when bid management runs on human hours instead of shelf conditions, and it’s exactly what. For the J.M. Smucker Company’s Uncrustables brand was up against. The solution, as it turns out, was a partnership approach, and the way PSOne, Profitero+, and Pacvue worked together to turn missed opportunities into closed sales is a model worth sharing.
Shelf conditions move faster than any one team
Historically, Walmart Connect campaigns respond to consumer signals like keyword searches and purchase behavior. Those signals move fast, but they still trail the shelf itself. A competitor’s stockout is a category wide demand event, and it can pass in hours.
Responding takes strategy, shelf data, and media activation, and those usually sit with different partners. A program that responds in the moment needs all three working as one coordinated system.
What each parter brought
PSOne’s strategy gave the Uncrustables program its direction. Profitero+ supplied real time inventory data from the shelf, and Pacvue connected that data to Walmart Connect bid rules so the team could act on it automatically. When a competing product went out of stock, bids rose.
None of these pieces works as well alone. Strategy needs timely data to act on, data needs a way to reach the media, and automation needs a strategy to tell it what to chase. Having all three teams in step made each one stronger.
What the partnership delivered
Over 12 months, 46 campaigns, and four ad formats, the three teams delivered an 11.14x blended ROAS. SP-Auto campaigns reached 29.3x at a cost per click more than three times lower than manually managed campaigns, and drove 61% of attributed sales from 23% of spend. Walmart’s omnichannel data also showed 5.4% of attributed sales happening in store.
What other brands and agencies can take from it
Start with the signal your team is missing, then decide which partner owns it. The Uncrustables program worked because each partner’s piece fit the others’: strategy that knew what to chase, data that showed when the opening appeared, and automation that acted on it.
It also reflects a way of working other teams can borrow. Bring technology partners into the strategy conversation early, and give them room to build around the goal.
That coordination is why Pacvue, PSOne, and Profitero+ won the Partnership Achievement award at the 2026 Walmart Connect Partner Awards. Thank you to the PSOne and Profitero+ teams, to J.M. Smucker, and to Walmart Connect for recognizing what a true partnership can do.
If you’re building a program that has to react to the shelf in real time, connect with our team to talk through what a similar strategy could do for your own teams.
