Building together: How strong partnerships drive advertising innovation

When Melissa Burdick first sketched the idea for Pacvue, it wasn’t in a boardroom. It was on a napkin. After a decade at Amazon—first in retail, then in the early days of advertising—she watched the company open its advertising API to partners and immediately saw the opportunity. The infrastructure was there. The signals were there. Melissa began drawing the pieces she wanted to bring together—things like sales and out-of-stocks—and the tools she believed Pacvue could build to help advertisers act on them.

Melissa shared the sketch with her co-founder, Zhaohui Tang, Pacvue’s technical and product architect. “I drew what I thought advertisers needed,” she recalls. “I took a picture and sent it to Zhaohui. A week later, he built it.”

The decision to take that leap was also deeply personal. After navigating an aggressive breast cancer diagnosis, Melissa emerged with a different perspective on risk. “If I can get through that,” she says, “I can build the company I’ve been thinking about.” That experience reframed fear as fuel—and sharpened her conviction to create.

The most durable innovations in advertising don't come from a single team building everything. They come from builders who know when to extend rather than replicate—and who find the right partners to build with. That's a dynamic Paula Despins and Melissa Burdick have spent years refining, and what they've learned applies well beyond their own story.

When we zig, they zag: the power of true partnership

From the beginning, Pacvue’s growth has been inseparable from its work with Amazon Ads. Paula frames the foundation clearly: “When we begin with ‘What do advertisers need?’ we deliver great outcomes.” Melissa describes the dynamic simply: “Where Amazon was zigging, we were trying to zag.”

That complementary approach—building on top of Amazon’s infrastructure rather than replicating it—is what both leaders describe as “1+1=3”: the idea that the right partnerships create more value. “It can never be one-sided,” Melissa says. “It always has to be good for both parties.” For advertisers, that means better tools, faster insights, and campaigns that reflect how customers actually shop.

Partnership in action: Pacvue’s Amazon Marketing Cloud story

When Amazon Marketing Cloud launched as an API-first capability, it opened access to powerful, privacy-safe insights—but working directly with that data required technical fluency, including SQL expertise. For many advertisers, translating those signals into actionable insights wasn’t straightforward.

Pacvue and other partners helped make those capabilities more accessible by building templated workflows that transform complex queries into usable reporting frameworks and help brands move from data to decisions faster.

More recently, Pacvue has been among the first partners trialing Amazon Ads MCP Server capabilities—pressure-testing AI-powered workflows and sharing candid feedback before broader release. “The strongest partnerships challenge us,” Paula says. “They tell us what’s working, what isn’t, and where the opportunity is. That transparency is what drives invention.”

Advice for women building their careers in advertising

Paula and Melissa have a clear message for women navigating their careers in advertising: raise your hand, even when it scares you. “Say yes—especially when it makes you uncomfortable,” Melissa says. “That’s actually a positive signal.” Paula agrees: “That might mean you’re growing.” Paula adds that one of the most important lessons she learned early in her career was to take a seat at the table—choosing to speak up and contribute rather than waiting for an invitation.

Both believe community is what makes growth sustainable: finding people who complement your strengths, showing up to the industry moments that stretch you, and paying it forward to the women coming up behind you.

Tune in to their conversation to learn more from Paula and Melissa about leadership, partnership, and building in advertising.