Today, we are experiencing a shift towards seamless commerce. Consumers have high expectations, are increasingly using digital channels to shop, and value the convenience of frictionless transactions. Both retailers and manufacturers are building infrastructures that support these preferences.
Brands are also coping with the industry shift away from third-party data, forcing more attention closer to the point of conversion. This creates a huge need for sophisticated retail media capabilities.
Luckily, retail media delivers a wide variety of benefits for brands: a closer relationship with retailers, creative services, access to owned and operated media/properties, first-party sales data, and personalization opportunities through creative.
It’s no wonder retail media spend is projected to skyrocket. According to Insider Intelligence predictions, US digital retail media ad spending will grow 31.4% to reach $40.81 billion this year. By 2024, the total will increase to $61.15 billion, making up nearly 20% of digital ad spending.
The need to grow market share will open more budget for brands to spend on advertising to bolster sales. But it is not easy, nor is it clear how to harness the right data in the omnichannel world to drive effective and efficient activation across your eCommerce and brick-and-mortar sales. Right now, brands are leveraging their own data, topped with information from retailers and data providers, such as NielsenIQ and IRi. This trend will continue, and we will see continuous convergence of channels, retailers, and advertising mediums in search of a perfect solution that addresses the need.
Maintaining retailer and brand profitability is essential for any business dealing with omnichannel commercialization of their products. Supply chain issues and economic inconsistencies in 2022 showed brands how critical and complex it is to keep control of product profitability while maintaining sustainable growth. It intensified the need to find integrated solutions that help manage this across global retailers.
Huge Changes for Pacvue in 2022
Retail media is a mandatory medium for brands hoping to reach key audiences at the right place, right time. To support this shift, Pacvue focused on helping brands tackle the ever-changing challenges across media and omnichannel Commerce.
We added hundreds of new features to Pacvue Advertising (which we detail below), but advertising is only one step in the commercial success of your products.
That’s why we released Pacvue Commerce—a solution that helps drive operational excellence for your eCommerce business. Pacvue Commerce supports the needs of brands selling goods to consumers, from sales and content to finance, IT, and supply chain. To complete the circle, we integrated Pacvue Advertising and Pacvue Commerce together. Within days, brands saw amazing results, including millions of dollars in prevented revenue leakage and thousands of hours saved by removing manual work from their teams.
Pacvue Commerce features added in 2022:
Buy Box Monitoring
Brands may lose Buy Box ownership for many reasons—and constantly monitoring it is close to impossible. Worse yet, losing the Buy Box may result in significant revenue losses, especially for high-traffic SKUs. Pacvue monitors your Buy Box and automatically files tickets with vendor support to recover the Buy Box ownership and prevent revenue leakage. Our clients have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars in prevented revenue leakage for a single SKU.
There are many reasons that require human intervention and manual communication with retailer vendor support. Some of these could harm your profitability and result in lost revenue. For instance, your products may get labeled as “Currently Unavailable.” Our automation identifies reasons the vendor doesn’t own the Buy Box when products are in stock and are active and files an automated ticket with vendor support to resolve this issue as it occurs. This is a manual process for any vendor today.
Calculating profitability is key for brands that want to drive sustainable, omnichannel growth. Your profitability will depend on how you manage product sales mix, trade agreements, marketing and search costs, and your capabilities to analyze and execute. With this feature, you get a 360-view of your profitability and know exactly what levers to pull to achieve profitability equilibrium.
Pacvue Advertising features:
Weighted SOV (Share of Voice)
Weighted Share of Voice is designed to measure the highest correlation between SOV ranking and sales performance, while standard SOV does not consider placement or volume. By weighting the share of search within Pacvue, we’re both offering a comprehensive view of the correlation between revenue and share of voice. By acknowledging that position 1 is more valuable than position 5 and that ranking for high volume keywords allows for stronger visibility than low volume keywords, advertisers can better evaluate visibility against organic revenue to determine success drivers.
Sonar helps advertisers identify strong performing keywords on one retailer that do not exist on other retailer platforms and launch them on those platforms in minutes. Sonar ensures that these all your retailer activations reap the benefits of insights and opportunities across platform. Users save hours comparing multiple platforms to make crucial decisions.
Rules Library
With Rules Library, advertisers can focus on various areas of the business, like organic placement, SOV, inventory, page views, star rating, and more, to create conditions to optimize respective areas and increase performance. It gives advertisers more control over their focus areas and allows for fewer hands-on keyboard manual optimizations, saving them hours. Rules Libraries are available for Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, and Commerce.
Benefits of Commerce and Advertising Integration:
Going beyond just retail operations, Pacvue Commerce seamlessly integrates with Pacvue Advertising to maximize advertising effectiveness. Here’s how:
- Control advertising spend based on product page content score to avoid driving traffic to products with low conversion rates.
- Stop product ads based on product replenishment status to prevent driving ad traffic to products that are being phased out.
- Manage advertising spend based on retailer stock product volume to control product supply and demand, which is essential to avoid losing organic and paid relevancy before going out of stock.
- Manage advertising spend based on your stock product volume to control product supply and demand.
- Control advertising spend based on the most recent product review score to avoid driving traffic to products with low conversion rates, as retailers’ organic and paid search algorithms include ratings and reviews.
- Prevent challenges caused by low product profitability and control total retail marketing investment.
- Adjust advertising goals and bids for a product when running a promotion.
New retailers
Brands understand the need to connect with customers where they shop—and expanding reach while maintaining a singular, easy-to-use platform is essential to maintain optimal performance. This year Pacvue added four new global retailers to support eCommerce growth:
Bol.com
Pacvue is the first software provider to offer advertising via bol.com. The new API helps sales partners and vendors scale eCommerce advertising on the growing European marketplace, making it possible to automatically create and manage advertisements more effectively on bol.com’s platform.
Kroger
The retail media business of Kroger Co. is expanding access to its on-site advertising inventory. Pacvue is among the first three approved advertising partners working with Kroger to buy product listing ads on Kroger eCommerce sites.
Sam’s Club
Sam’s Club MAP Advertisers now have access to search and sponsored product ads via Pacvue, enabling brands to better reach and engage with Sam’s Club members at the right moment of discovery and purchase.
DoorDash
Now brands that use DoorDash ads have access to our industry-leading suite to programmatically manage campaigns.
Where Pacvue is Going in 2023
We constantly listen to our customers when building products to address business needs, solve common problems, and help brands adapt to a changing retail landscape. 2023 will be no different. With actionable recommendations, advanced artificial intelligence, customizable automations, and deep platform and retailer integrations, our team is eager to deliver growth, operational excellence, and research capabilities for brands and agencies.
Here are some trends we’re monitoring:
Convergence of media with retail media to dominate 2023
TikTok and Meta are building their way into eCommerce, and Amazon is launching a TikTok-like shopping experience. We are observing the convergence of digital mediums that will only further evolve into an even more integrated media mix dominated by retail media. GroupM projects retail media advertising to grow by about 60% by 2027, exceeding the expected growth for all digital advertising. While Dentsu projects retail media will increase by 22% in 2023 alone, despite the economic turbulence ahead.
The industry is experiencing a cataclysmic shift
With high inflation and risks of recession, brands and advertisers are heading into 2023 conservatively. Brands are making sure they are consolidating their technology stack to keep costs low, using the most efficient advertising solutions. Companies will seek to optimize all business areas, from marketing and advertising to manufacturing and supply chain.
