Sunglass Hut Beats Holiday Foot Traffic Benchmarks by 17% Despite Peak Competition

Store visitation validated by Cuebiq, the leading foot traffic measurement provider

Overview

Brand: Sunglass Hut / EssilorLuxottica
Channel: Connected TV
Geography: Nationwide United States
Duration: November 2025 Holiday Campaign

Result: 17% improvement vs benchmark

The Challenge

Holiday 2025 represented peak CTV competition. Sunglass Hut needed to drive nationwide in-store traffic during the most compressed shopping window of the year while competing against every major retailer for consumer attention.

Traditional media optimization requires weekly reviews, manual testing cycles, and lagging data. With only a 30-day campaign window, sequential testing that takes weeks simply couldn't deliver the speed required.

"PurePlay allowed us to move at the pace our holiday campaign demanded.

With a short flight and heavy competition, real-time insights helped us cut waste, focus on the markets actually driving store visits, and shift spend away from oversaturated environments toward whitespace we could own.

That agility made a measurable difference in both awareness and foot traffic."

Ricki Venezia
Sr. Manager of Media, Sunglass Hut

The Solution: Two-Phase Intelligence Approach

PurePlay deployed a dual-value workflow combining upfront strategic intelligence with continuous optimization.

Phase 1: Pre-Campaign Multimodal Analysis

Before serving a single impression, PurePlay's AI analyzed Sunglass Hut's creative assets across multiple dimensions—visual composition, messaging hierarchy, emotional tone, and competitive positioning.

This intelligence informed strategic decisions for both publisher-direct and programmatic tactics, ensuring every placement started from an optimized baseline.

Phase 2: A/B Test—Agentic vs. Publisher-Direct

To measure the incremental value of autonomous optimization, PurePlay structured the campaign as a controlled experiment:

Line A: Publisher-direct placements informed by multimodal analysis
Line B: PurePlay's agentic optimization—autonomous AI agents continuously testing and reallocating across creative, audience, inventory, and competitive landscape

What PurePlay’s Agents Optimized

Creative Alignment: Matched top-performing videos to audiences and publishers where they overperformed
Audience Precision: Tested and recombined granular segments based on real-time performance
Competitive Intelligence: Adjusted bid logic based on live competitive exposure
Inventory Optimization: Shifted budgets dynamically to prioritize high-ROI supply paths
Bid Repricing: Adjusted bids continuously using live performance feedback

Why Agentic Optimization Mattered
During the most competitive retail window of the year, PurePlay’s agent continuously evaluated visit likelihood across time of day, geography, and exposure patterns, dynamically reallocating spend away from impressions showing diminishing returns and toward inventory segments demonstrating incremental lift. This decisioning enabled the campaign to outperform benchmarks despite elevated seasonal CPM pressure.

The platform tested thousands of creative-audience-inventory combinations simultaneously, creating a learning velocity humans can't match.

The Results

Key Insights

Multimodal analysis delivers value regardless of media strategy: Even publisher-direct placements significantly outperformed benchmarks when informed by PurePlay's pre-campaign intelligence
Agentic optimization creates measurable lift: The 9-percentage-point gap between lines (17% vs. 9%) demonstrates the incremental value of continuous, autonomous optimization
Machine-speed learning velocity: Continuous micro-allocation that reduced media waste and accelerated learning beyond what humans can execute manually

“PurePlay is the first platform I've seen that seamlessly integrates competitive intelligence, creative intelligence, and a real-time feedback performance loop into a single, operationalized campaign.

We achieved our best holiday campaign performance to date.”

Caroline Proto
Head of Global Media, EssilorLuxottica

A Note From Our Client

Caroline Proto
Head of Global Media, EssilorLuxottica

What This Means For Retail Media

This dual-value approach means PurePlay can partner with brands regardless of their programmatic strategy. Whether you're running publisher-direct, programmatic, or a hybrid approach, PurePlay's multimodal intelligence adds value at the planning stage—and for clients ready to scale, agentic optimization delivers measurable incremental lift.

The results open new possibilities: store-tiered optimization, always-on visitation loops, regional creative versioning, and predictive bidding that anticipates competitive pressure before it materializes.

Measurement Partner: Cuebiq
Cuebiq measures store visitation using privacy-compliant, anonymized location data from 15M+ US consumers.