Beyond Heroes & Zombies

Challenge

River Island’s Performance Max campaigns were stuck in the past. As a trend-led fashion retailer with a fast-moving product range, their campaigns couldn’t keep up.

The problem? A static hero/zombie setup that sorted products into fixed buckets based almost entirely on historical performance. New arrivals — no matter how strategically important — were immediately disadvantaged because they had no click or conversion history. Meanwhile, 80–90% of the catalog sat in a data-starved longtail, trapped in a cycle where no visibility meant no data, no data meant no promotion, and no promotion meant no performance.

For a retailer whose inventory changes with every season, this rigid structure was holding back growth. River Island needed a PMax setup that could evolve as fast as their collections.

Solution

smec’s Campaign Orchestrator replaced River Island’s static campaign structure with a dynamic, AI-driven approach built around three core components:

SmartScoreAI addressed the biggest blind spot in Performance Max: data scarcity. Instead of relying solely on historical clicks and conversions, the proprietary AI model evaluated every product in the catalog using a neighbourhood effect — assessing items alongside similar products based on shared attributes like product type, brand, price range, and seasonality. Products that shared characteristics with strong performers received scores reflecting their true potential, not just their past results. These scores updated daily, giving new arrivals and longtail items a fair shot at visibility.

Dynamic Segments turned those AI-driven scores into strategic action. River Island used smec’s Campaign Orchestrator to define multi-dimensional product segments — each tied to a clear business intent:

• High-potential products with strong Smart Scores were pushed through growth-oriented campaigns.
• Proven performers were grouped for efficiency and ROAS protection.
• New arrivals entered an exploration segment to gather data without over-investing.
• Low-priority items stayed visible but contained, so they wouldn’t drain budget from higher-value products.

As product signals changed, items moved automatically between segments.

Budget & tROAS orchestration broke through the campaign silo problem. Instead of optimizing each PMax campaign in isolation, smec’s Smart Budget Allocation managed investment at the account level — automatically shifting spend toward campaigns that could deliver better results and away from where it was being wasted. Budgets and tROAS targets moved together, aligned with strategic intent across the entire portfolio.

Results

The shift from static bucketing to AI-powered product scoring and dynamic campaign orchestration delivered strong year-over-year results across River Island’s key categories:

Womenswear: +32% orders · +33% revenue · +15% ROAS

Kidswear: +30% orders · +34% revenue · +19% ROAS

With smarter signals powering their PMax campaigns, new arrivals surfaced earlier, hidden longtail products got a fair chance to perform, and incremental revenue was unlocked beyond River Island’s established bestsellers. The team moved from reacting to past performance to proactively anticipating where growth would come from next.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what their Paid Media Lead had to say:

“Performance Max was always a challenge for us — it lacked the visibility and control we needed to scale profitably. With smec’s Campaign Orchestrator and SmartScoreAI, we finally unlocked the potential of PMax. We now make data-driven decisions and continuously grow revenue while maintaining strong ROAS.”

– Elvis Mugera, Paid Media Lead, River Island