Pacvue

Walmart Adds Negative Keywords for Sponsored Search

Walmart Connect has added negative-keyword functionality to Sponsored Products search campaigns, enabling advertisers to exclude specific queries so ads won't appear for those terms. Announced in late July 2026 and now live in the Walmart Connect Ad Center and available via partner technology providers including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques, the tool is designed to improve budget efficiency, reduce irrelevant traffic and support campaign optimization. Agencies and vendors—including Pacvue, Podean and Flywheel—have long requested the capability, which aligns Walmart with competitors (Amazon added negative keywords in 2019; Sam’s Club Connect offered them for years). Industry observers say the change could shift where brands allocate spend, potentially raising CPCs on competitive category terms while lowering account-level ROAS that was previously inflated by branded-term spend.

Survey: Media Buyers Unready for Agentic Revolution

Kiri Masters argues that despite widespread announcements of AI agents for media buying, most media buyers and brands lack the data infrastructure and integrations required to adopt agentic workflows. A Skai survey of 332 paid media practitioners found a mean 'agentic readiness' score of 35.7/100, with 30% unprepared, 49% exploring, and only 3% having AI embedded at scale. Retail media and CPG brands score below the 'Building' tier, and very few organisations expose agent-readable data or end-to-end orchestration. The piece highlights the gap between C-suite enthusiasm and practitioner readiness and warns that agentic advantages will depend on retailers and platforms making data accessible to agents.

Pacvue Introduces Pacvue Prism to Power Agentic Commerce Grid

Pacvue has added Pacvue Agent and Pacvue MCP to its Insights & Intelligence offerings, and rebranded Pacvue Agent as Pacvue Prism with a new tagline 'Power your Agentic Commerce Grid'.