Retail Media Closes the Gap Between Data and Spend

Retail media has spent the past two years proving it can generate data. The harder problem, and the one this week’s Horizon Commerce and Pacvue expansion is actually solving, is getting that data back into the hands of the people deciding where to spend next.

Horizon Commerce, the commerce arm of Horizon Media Holdings, is deepening its tie-up with Pacvue so that Horizon’s Blu Commerce measurement platform feeds directly into Pacvue’s Commerce Media Operating System, connecting cross-retailer measurement and scenario planning to the activation layer that actually places bids and adjusts budgets across retail media networks. “Retail media has no shortage of data. The harder problem is turning that data into a consistent investment decision,” said Katie Comerford, president of Horizon Commerce. Melissa Burdick, co-founder and president of Pacvue, framed the same gap from the execution side: “With more touchpoints across the customer journey than ever, measurement and activation must keep pace.”

The companies point to a live case: Revlon’s Mitchum brand ran campaigns through the integrated stack and saw a 13 percent average weekly revenue lift, a 19-point improvement in Best Seller Rank, and a 5 percent lift in paid search revenue with a 3 percent lift in paid search conversion rate.

The original insight here is not the lift numbers, which any vendor pairing can produce a case study for. It is that the disconnect Comerford describes, measurement systems that identify the opportunity and activation systems that execute on it, running on separate taxonomies with no shared handoff, has been retail media’s quiet tax on every campaign since the category started scaling. More issuers and networks are entering commerce media from the data side, and measurement vendors keep bolting themselves onto adjacent channels. Each new connection is worth less than the last unless someone closes the loop from insight to action, which is the specific job this expansion is built to do.

Source: PR Newswire: Horizon Commerce and Pacvue partnership announcement