2024 marked another year of growth, expansion and changes in the world of retail media and eCommerce, from Instacart partnering with Google to Costco launching its own retail media network, to Walmart completing its acquisition of VIZIO.
AI moved from a buzzword to reality in 2024, enabling brands to scale their advertising strategies across marketplaces and ad types. At Pacvue, we embraced these changes with a slate of exciting and impactful improvements to our suite, including new product launches, marketplaces, partnerships, and strategies built in collaboration with our customers. Let’s take a look at what innovations shaped Pacvue in 2024.
Expanding the Ecosystem
Launching Ads on Chewy
Launched in Q4 of last year, this partnership just missed the cut of our 2023 year in review, but brands and agencies got to spend 2024 launching campaigns & accelerating growth on Chewy. By launching ads across Chewy within Pacvue’s platform, pet brands can target 20 million pet parents with peak performance and precision.
One of the early success stories came from a premium pet food brand that partnered with Merkle to leverage Pacvue’s staple features, like bid multiplier rules and share-of-voice reporting to grow average monthly sales by 90%. As Merkle scaled the brand’s advertising they also saw their average Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) improve by 50%, allowing them to drive more growth with their client’s advertising dollars.
“Pacvue has been key to scaling our premium pet food brand’s Chewy Sponsored Products program. Sales volume and efficiency have improved notably since onboarding. Campaign management is streamlined, allowing the Merkle and client teams more time to focus on big picture strategy and optimizations. Pacvue’s unique SOV reporting has also helped inform strategy with more visibility to competition.” –Luc Watson, Associate Manager eRetail, Merkle
GroupM Custom Dashboards for Connected Commerce
Next in the line of Pacvue’s market-leading innovation was the development of an Integrated Commerce Management Solution with GroupM.
The collaboration granted unique solutions to GroupM clients that can now leverage Pacvue’s technology across multiple fronts, including:
- Insights: The collaboration unlocked access to unified Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Analytics via the direct integration of GroupM’s best-in-class diagnostics and visualizations and expanded the ability to create/deploy custom audiences in Amazon DSP all in one seamless platform.
- Media Management: Over ten customer GroupM rules and algorithms can be applied through one-click enablement in a streamlined user interface and will now gain early access to newly integrated retailers and channels provided by Pacvue.
- Retail Operations: To further merge retail operations and media, the solution offers one interface and reporting dashboard so GroupM clients can holistically monitor media, 3P content hijacking, content syndication and chargebacks.
NIQ & Pacvue Expand Partnership
An exciting announcement came out in December: NIQ’s “Strategic Alliance” with Pacvue expands with additional firepower. This initiative delivers new capabilities surrounding rules automation with NIQ, further enabling users to connect siloed data and execute campaigns with precision.
Melissa Burdick, Pacvue’s Co-Founder and President, said of the partnership, “This collaboration allows brands to seamlessly connect our performance marketing expertise with NIQ’s robust e-commerce analytics, offering a unified solution to drive growth in an increasingly competitive market.”
Continued Innovations in AI
Copilot: Your New AI Companion
As our product suite continues to expand, we have seen an opportunity to improve how we support our customers. That’s where Pacvue Copilot came into the picture. To help our customers work smarter and faster, we developed Pacvue Copilot, an AI companion built on a large language model (LLM). From questions like “Show me the top 10 campaign performance from last month sorted by sales” to guidance such as, “How can I prevent overspending?” Copilot is there to help you pull insights and gain intelligent recommendations based on campaign goals.
AI Innovations Across the Product Suite
Outside of Copilot, which was a net new feature in 2024, we also spent significant investment in AI capabilities within our entire suite of solutions, particularly in the creation and maintenance of campaigns. Integrating AI achieves better results for our users across nearly every facet of commerce management:
- Efficiency and Scalability – AI helps you set up and optimize several campaigns simultaneously.
- Performance Improvements – AI makes multiple micro-changes & adapts strategy based on your custom KPIs.
- Strategic Insights and Recommendations – Interpreting large amounts data and providing initial feedback gives practitioners the ability to spend less time looking at numbers and more time making key decisions.
Like with all automation, changes made to the account are fully documented and can be superseded by a human practitioner. While AI is a massive boon to the success of a retail media marketer, the folks at Pacvue will always stand by the importance of the human element: guiding a brand’s long-term vision, using intuition on key decisions, and connecting the different aspects of technology to achieve the best results.
Expanding AMC and DSP Capabilities
Amazon Marketing Cloud might be the most powerful source of data within retail media given the deep customer insights it offers. Paired with Amazon’s DSP offering, brands can target highly relevant consumers across every stage of the funnel.
It’s important to note, though, that these services should work holistically within your Amazon and retail media strategies. In 2024, Pacvue doubled down on making both DSP and AMC more actionable, more cohesive, and much, much more powerful.
AMC Audience Creation
With enhanced Audience Creation features, users have had the ability to integrate first-party data into Amazon Marketing Cloud, enabling additional customer insights and opening the opportunity to target high-value segments based on engagement and new-to-brand data.
It’s also now possible to leverage AMC data for users only using Sponsored Ads, allowing users to leverage AMC’s powerful capabilities through Pacvue without needing a DSP seat. This expanded functionality gives users more precise control over spend and targeting for Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brands campaigns.
Enhanced DSP Suite
Developing top-rated, powerful ad tech isn’t always about sweeping improvements. Just like how performance marketing is built off small improvements, the Pacvue DSP suite evolved incrementally in 2024. By following our north star of having the most powerful Amazon DSP tool in the market and by listening to our client’s feedback, we released a host of new functionality this year that made the platform more powerful than ever.
For instance, users can pause DSP creatives when an ASIN goes out of stock or loses the Buy Box, ensuring no wasted ad spend. Another exciting feature released this year is 1P Audience Creation: by leveraging AMC data, users can create precise audience segments based on various metrics such as purchase frequency, purchase value, and engagement levels.
The advancements in AI positively impacted our DSP tool, as well. By leveraging AI in our DSP suite, brands can automate orders and line-order adjustments with full transparency via logs. Make micro-adjustments to the full breadth of DSP campaigns using our rules library to set the proper direction and parameters.
Incrementality
Pacvue’s long awaited incrementality solution launched this year, and dare we say, it was worth the wait. The key differentiator in our incrementality solution is that it is an advanced model that uses multiple data points, not a simple algorithm or single data source. Pacvue’s iROAS model goes beyond standard ROAS by using advanced machine learning models, trained multiple times, to measure the most reliable incremental impact of your advertising.
When fully onboarded, Pacvue clients are granted an extremely potent insight for campaign optimization. Accurately forecasting the impact of ad spend cannot be understated – it’s an exciting venture, it’s in Pacvue, and it’s only just the beginning.
Maximizing Profitability with Revenue Recovery
Since launching, Pacvue’s Revenue Recovery service has resolved over 128,000 cases for our clients, recovering tens of millions of dollars. Launched in 2023, 2024 saw more brands take advantage of the service and, in turn, recover more revenue that would have otherwise been lost.
Other than the large number of cases processed, and amount of revenue recovered for our clients, we also launched our Revenue Recovery service for 3P sellers, after launching exclusively for 1P sellers last year. Disputing these claims usually involves meticulous, time-consuming work within Amazon’s platform, downloading reports and consolidating them with internal documentation.
Our solution gives time, and lost revenue, back to our clients by resolving four types of claims: Inbound Disputes, Lost and Damaged via Warehouse, Return/Replacement/Exchange, and Pick & Pack.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As we enter 2025, we remain committed to solution-led growth, making our clients success our number one priority, and by creating a strong feedback loop with our partners. We aim to unify our industry, consolidate the ineffable and disparate streams of data, and become a driving force towards combining Commerce and Retail Media signals.
In 2025, Pacvue will redefine how commerce and retail media work together. By combining these two forces, we deliver impact that goes beyond the sum of its parts.
On the Commerce side, Pacvue enables true omnichannel retail execution—spanning online and offline, empowering clients to maximize sales, improve their product profitability and grow their market share
On the ads side, Pacvue delivers cross-retailer media excellence, enabling advertisers to unlock opportunities within individual retailer ecosystems while maintaining a holistic media strategy.
By combining the power of Commerce and Retail Media, Pacvue creates a seamlessly interconnected ecosystem where performance thrives, operations are streamlined, and growth accelerates.
We’re excited to see where the next year takes us.
