Beyond Retail Media: Connected Commerce with Pacvue’s Tommy Burton

AdTechGod (0:00)

Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it.

I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGodPod, where we speak to the partnership leaders of our industry. Today, I'm joined by Tommy Burton, Vice President of Global Partnerships at Pacvue. Tommy has a pretty unique view on the commerce media world. Before Pacvue, he spent seven years at Amazon helping expand Amazon DSP, connected television, and Amazon marketing cloud across the agency ecosystem. He's also spent some time at AOL, Yahoo, and others on the advertising side. He's now at Pacvue and just wanted to fully disclose, this episode is sponsored by Amazon Ads, and I'm really excited to have him with us today. So thank you, Amazon, for sponsoring this episode, and thank you for bringing Tommy to the pod. Tommy, welcome, and thanks for joining me.

Tommy Burton (0:55)

Oh, excited to be here, ATG. And yeah, big thanks to Amazon for getting us together.

AdTechGod (0:59)

It's incredible, because Amazon, you're former Amazon. You're now at Pacvue, so you must have left on some really good terms for them to do this.

Tommy Burton (1:09)

I hope so. Hopefully, that's a good sign that I'm still in their good graces.

AdTechGod (1:13)

I'd love to hear from you, Tommy. I interview everyone. I kind of start the same way, which is, I believe that it's really people-run business. I think personality is important. Getting to know our guests is really important. I'd love to hear your background at Amazon and others, and how you got to where you're at today is leading up Global Partnerships at Pacvue.

Tommy Burton (1:33)

Yeah. Listen, I think I kind of describe myself as a programmatic guy at heart who somehow ended up in a retail media. Specifically, I was lucky enough out of school to get into the early stages of programmatic. I was at Yahoo working on the search side and right around this time is when they purchased the right media exchange. And so I quickly transitioned over to that team and essentially was managing campaigns for a lot of the largest advertisers looking to drive performance across the right media exchange. From there, I did a brief stint on the client side. This was at University of Phoenix. I was lucky that they were a top buyer in the space at that time, so got a ton of exposure to all the DSPs and all the programmatic solutions coming to market. Then went over back on the sales side at AOL. Of course, the AOL blood runs deep in this industry. Really look at my time at Yahoo and AOL is a badge of honor. It was really front row seat to education and the growth of programmatic. I really cherish those relationships because I still get to work with a lot of those friends in the industry today. As I was looking to really move out of AOL during the time of transition with Oath, Verizon Media and everything going on there, I reached out to one of my good friends, Matt Garcia, who was actually building the programmatic sales team at Amazon Ads.

This was an exciting and really unique time at Amazon Ads. You had the sponsored ads business scaling extremely rapidly. It was really getting all the attention in the marketplace and it was really building what we know today as the retail media landscape. This was the early days of Amazon Ads scaling.

We were kind of a small team that essentially was tasked with scaling the adoption of Amazon's DSP self-service offering.

When you join Amazon, you automatically get kind of a crash course in all things retail media. Being a programmatic guy, it wasn't just about audiences and inventory and bid strategy. I had to learn about the retail media health of a brand.

You're looking at things like inventory, pricing, merchandising, promotions. All these things are like, they're a new aspect of being successful in retail that is essential in the ads part of the business.

AdTechGod (4:01)

Most people who work in retail media, and yes, there are some large retail media networks and online retailers, but nobody really has a scale that Amazon has. I don't think people really recognize just the sheer volume of skews, transactions, login data, purchase history.

It's an incredible scale that is so powerful for performance marketers, for brand marketers. That's really rare. I would love to hear from you. What was your biggest learning that you got from Amazon, really jumping into what seemed to be the earlier days of Amazon advertising compared to where they're at even today?

Tommy Burton (4:39)

You described that rich data set that you were just talking about. One of the biggest challenges was in those early days, was bringing that narrative and understanding to the programmatic marketplace as we were trying to launch the DSP.