How to Fix Retail Media Fragmentation: Q&A with Clare Hogan

Retail media is one of the fastest-growing segments in the ad tech industry today. By 2025, the market is expected to be worth $67 billion in ad spend, accounting for 20% of digital ad budgets. But, with more than 200 retail media networks out there, advertisers have one problem above all—measuring what works best. 

Clare Hogan, Head of Retailer Partnerships at Pacvue, recently explained in an interview why Pacvue’s biggest mission is solving for fragmentation, so suppliers and advertisers can more easily connect the dots between two, five, fifteen, or even fifty or more retail media networks. 

Insights vs. Data

Clare explored a key issue for most brands and agencies struggling to measure retail media performance—insights versus data. Despite having access to reporting tools, these businesses have difficulty translating raw data into hard results.

“Pacvue believes that insights versus data is a big piece in the retail media ecosystem,” she explained. “We have seen that teams need multiple headcounts to string together the data across all these retailers and media partners. Then, they have to dig in to understand what’s moving the needle. We piece that together in our platform.” 
By solving for fragmentation rather than just looking at one retailer, Pacvue pulls in signals across each partner and helps brands optimize those signals. The unique part is that this landscape comprises measurement partners, vendors, and suppliers working together to build a source of truth.

“We’re building a commerce ecosystem,” Clare said. “Insight-to-action capability drives way more efficiency and reduces complexity.”

The ultimate goal is to streamline this experience by keeping it all in a single platform. 

The Pacvue Difference

When Pacvue started, Clare explained that the company wanted to solve retail media fragmentation specifically. But now, as the platform has connected more partners, the larger mission is to help suppliers accelerate business at the retailers. This means going beyond just media.

“Now, we’re solving for retail fragmentation in the ecosystem as a whole,” Clare said. “We have connectivity as an operation from start to finish. Not just the ads piece.” 

It’s the connections that make the difference. Pacvue doesn’t just measure opportunities for media optimization; our technology also helps brands understand market fit, delivering new insights on how to optimize strategy, supply, and profitability.

A Post-Fragmentation Landscape

Armed with signals from a broad range of retail partners and vendors, brands and agencies can focus on new initiatives. Clare specifically sees three different kinds of trends in the near future:

1. Unique Audiences: More advertisers want to build new-to-brand, lookalike audiences based on first-party data and reach those customers with behavioral targeting based on attributes and retail media browsing habits.
2. AI-Powered Creative: With AI, Pacvue sees a demand for granular data on how creative impacts user behavior, including metrics on which creative performs best and the ability to customize that creative with AI to achieve different goals.
3. Budget Control: Most of all, brands want more control over campaign budgets—and ad spend in particular—so they can track how spend affects different objectives and dynamically adjust their spend to achieve profitability.

Ultimately, Clare illustrates why it takes a new kind of ecosystem—one that goes beyond retail media—to solve fragmentation. Brands need to consider a greater range of data points to successfully manage the numerous vendors, partners, and suppliers they’ll interact with across the commerce space. As always, Pacvue is proud to offer a central location and single source of truth for brands and agencies to discover, analyze, act, and ultimately profit from those signals.