Inside the Cloud: How Pets at Home Powered Real-Time Audience Activation with First-Party Data

The Challenge

As third-party data deprecation accelerated, Pets at Home needed to find a way to activate its rich first-party data — 8.2 million active Pets Club members — without sacrificing privacy, control or performance. Traditional activation models required customer data to leave the brand's own environment, creating both compliance risk and commercial inefficiency.

The Strategy

Pets partnered with AUDIENCES to deploy an in-cloud, native data activation model, enabling first-party data to be segmented and activated entirely within Pets' own cloud environment.

Execution and Innovation

This approach unlocked real-time audience intelligence across the digital ecosystem, using behavioural and transactional insights to re-engage existing customers, target high-value lookalikes and exclude existing customers from acquisition activity to reduce wasted spend.

Results

ROAS improved by 18%, wasted acquisition spend fell through smarter exclusions, and retention performance strengthened, unlocking significant incremental revenue and embedding first-party data as a scalable, privacy-safe performance engine.

Judges' Verdict

"A genuinely rare feat — solving the complex 'privacy vs. performance' puzzle, ensuring sensitive data never left their hands while simultaneously driving incremental growth."

"This project didn't just improve efficiency; it established a new standard for data governance and ownership, positioning a heritage brand as a sophisticated leader in real-time retail data activation."