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One of the most interesting shifts in ecommerce advertising over the last year has been the widening gap between two types of platforms. On one side, you have orchestration-heavy suites like Hunch Ads, built to manage catalogs, campaigns, and rules all in one place. On the other, you have focused creative automation tools like Marpipe, built to turn your product feed into high-performing ad creative without touching your media buying workflow.
Hunch has built its reputation on being “more than creative.” It promises marketers not just templates for dynamic product ads, but a single operating system for campaign automation — weather-based triggers, geo-localized rollouts, and time-sensitive rules. For brands with very complex, multinational campaigns, that orchestration can sound appealing.
But here’s the reality in 2025: most performance marketers aren’t struggling with orchestration. They’re struggling with creative scale. They need to turn messy product feeds into a competitive advantage, test creative variations quickly, and generate product-level ads that outperform static templates. That’s why so many advertisers kick the tires on Hunch, but ultimately lean toward Marpipe or other creative-first alternatives.
Hunch entered the market with a clear proposition: simplify the chaos of running catalog ads at scale. By combining catalog management, creative templates, and campaign orchestration in one platform, it positioned itself as a single solution for advertisers who didn’t want to juggle multiple tools.
For some brands, particularly those with distributed operations across multiple regions, this message resonates. Hunch allows advertisers to spin up geo-localized variations, schedule campaigns that change with the seasons or weather, and set rules that automate campaign swaps. In theory, this means less time building campaigns manually and more consistency across markets.
The creative tools inside Hunch also deserve credit. By allowing integrations with design programs like PSD and Figma, it has given creative teams a bridge between their workflows and campaign execution. Add in AI-driven features like background removal or orientation adjustments, and you have a platform that aims to reduce the manual grunt work of versioning.
Finally, Hunch emphasizes its service layer. Its onboarding process is hands-on, with customer success teams involved from the beginning. For advertisers who want white-glove support and a guided path into automation, this model feels reassuring.
Taken together, Hunch presents itself as a platform for advertisers who want fewer moving parts and more automation, bundling creative and campaign management into one operating system.
The challenge with Hunch’s approach is that breadth often comes at the expense of depth. By trying to own the entire workflow (catalog, creative, and campaigns), Hunch risks becoming bulky and redundant. Most performance marketers are already embedded in Ads Manager and have no intention of moving their campaign management into a third-party tool. For them, Hunch seems to be duplicating.
Even on the creative side, the innovation feels surface-level. Yes, there are templates and design integrations, but Hunch is not built as a true creative testing engine. It doesn’t enable rapid SKU-level iteration or product-level video generation, nor does it provide the kind of feed-to-creative workflow that lets marketers scale creative variations in minutes. Its strength is orchestration, not creativity.
Pricing compounds these limitations. With a flat entry point of €2,500 per month, Hunch immediately prices itself into the enterprise tier. For multinational retailers, that may feel aligned with budget. But for most ecommerce brands, the economics simply don’t work. A platform that bundles orchestration with creative may justify its cost on paper, but in practice many teams only use a fraction of the features they’re paying for.
The complexity of onboarding adds another layer of friction. Because Hunch redefines the workflow itself, teams must spend weeks or months retraining on a new system. During that time, campaigns often continue to be run in Ads Manager, leading to duplication of effort and eventual frustration. Instead of empowering marketers, the platform can end up slowing them down.
These challenges highlight a larger truth about catalog advertising in 2025: orchestration is not the primary bottleneck. Creative scale is.
Every ecommerce brand now understands that catalog ads drive the majority of their conversions. The question is not whether to run them, but how to make them stand out. The bottleneck is rarely “How do I launch campaigns in multiple markets faster?” but almost always “How do I generate high-performing creative for every SKU in my catalog, without burning out my design team?”
This is why the market has shifted toward platforms that go deeper into the creative and feed layer, rather than broader into orchestration. Product feeds are now the creative infrastructure. Every title, image, and attribute becomes the building block of your ads. Optimizing that feed, and layering automation on top of it to generate product-level creative variations, is what separates average campaigns from high-performing ones.
Platforms like Marpipe lean into this shift. Instead of trying to replace Ads Manager, they supercharge it by ensuring the inputs for feeds and creative are as strong as possible. In a world where AI-driven discovery engines pull directly from structured data, that focus on feed integrity and automation is exactly where performance marketers want to invest.
When you compare Marpipe and Hunch directly, the distinction becomes clear. Hunch attempts to be a single operating system, blending creative with campaign automation. Marpipe stays focused on creative performance, integrating directly into existing workflows rather than trying to replace them.
Marpipe’s value begins with the product feed. It includes free feed management, meaning broken images, missing attributes, or sync issues don’t derail campaigns. From there, it enables dynamic template building, letting marketers design once and apply across hundreds or thousands of SKUs automatically. Add in product-level video, AI-powered copywriting, and generative creative variations, and Marpipe becomes a true creative engine that keeps pace with today’s performance demands.
Pricing is also structured for growth. Instead of forcing every customer into a €2,500 monthly floor, Marpipe scales with SKU count, number of brands, and sync schedules. That flexibility makes it accessible for smaller advertisers, while still powerful enough for larger ones. The end result is a platform that feels aligned with how brands actually grow, rather than one that assumes everyone has enterprise budgets from day one.
In short, Hunch is broad. Marpipe is deep. And in 2025, depth wins.
Hunch and Marpipe are not the only platforms competing for catalog ad dollars. Smartly.io Review & Alternatives continues to serve the largest global advertisers with enterprise-grade orchestration, though at a premium price point and with a long implementation cycle. ROI Hunter Review & Alternatives appeals to retailers who prioritize analytics and product intelligence, pulling SKU-level performance data into feed optimization. Confect.io Review & Alternatives provides simple creative templates for smaller teams, while Abyssale Review & Alternatives focuses on automating static visuals.
Each of these platforms makes a different bet on what matters most. Smartly bets on orchestration. ROI Hunter bets on insights. Confect.io bets on simplicity. Abyssale bets on design automation. And Marpipe bets on creative performance — the intersection of feeds and creative where campaign outcomes are truly decided.
Explore the full comparison series:
Smartly Review & Alternatives
ROI Hunter Review & Alternatives
Socioh Review & Alternatives
Abyssale Review & Alternatives
Confect.io Review & Alternatives
There is a place for Hunch in this landscape. For advertisers with highly complex multinational campaigns, particularly those that require geo-localized or weather-triggered ads, Hunch provides orchestration features that reduce manual effort. Its service-heavy model will also appeal to teams that want a partner deeply involved in onboarding and campaign setup.
But those are edge cases. The majority of performance marketers are not running dozens of weather-triggered campaigns across global markets. They are running catalog ads on Meta, TikTok, and Google, and their pain points are creative scale and feed optimization. For those marketers, Hunch offers more platform than they need and not enough of the specific tools that drive ROI.
Brands that choose Marpipe do so because it solves the actual problem they face: scaling catalog creative. They don’t need another campaign manager. They need a creative engine.
Marpipe provides that engine. It starts with feed integrity, making sure the data that powers campaigns is clean and reliable. It then layers creative automation on top, from dynamic templates to product-level video. It integrates AI to generate variations and speed up iteration cycles. And it does all of this without asking marketers to abandon the workflows they already trust.
For ecommerce brands, this focus translates directly into performance. Cleaner feeds and sharper creative mean higher click-through rates, better return on ad spend, and more efficient use of media budgets. Instead of paying for orchestration features they may never use, they invest in the one lever that consistently drives results.
What often gets lost in platform comparisons is the bigger picture: why catalog ads have become the centerpiece of ecommerce growth, and how their evolution is shaping the next generation of performance marketing.
Catalog ads were once treated as a utility format, something you “set and forget” to capture retargeting traffic. That mindset doesn’t work anymore. In 2025, catalog-driven ads on Meta, TikTok, and Google Shopping account for the majority of paid conversions for ecommerce brands. Instead of running quietly in the background, they’ve become the front line of customer acquisition and retention.
This shift is tied directly to the rise of AI-driven discovery. When shoppers ask conversational search engines to show them products under a certain price point, with a specific material, or from a local retailer, the engine doesn’t invent the answer. It queries structured product feeds. That means your product feed, and the creative automation layered on top of it, determines whether your brand appears in those high-intent moments. Catalog ads go beyond retargeting. They’ve entered the world of discoverability.
This also means the creative bar has been raised. Static images recycled from product pages are no longer enough. Platforms are prioritizing motion-first formats like video, and consumers are more likely to click on ads that feel dynamic and personalized. The brands winning in this environment are the ones that treat their product feed as creative infrastructure, building systems that can generate video variations, test different styles of copy, and scale campaigns around their top-performing SKUs.
Looking ahead, the platforms that succeed will be the ones that recognize this shift and build specifically for it. Orchestration-heavy suites like Hunch will always have a role for enterprises managing dozens of markets. But for the majority of performance marketers, the future belongs to tools that go deep on creative performance and feed integrity. Marpipe’s bet, that catalog creative is the single most important lever in modern advertising, is aligned with where the industry is already heading.
The next two years will likely accelerate this divide. AI will continue to transform product discovery, creative iteration, and campaign optimization. Catalog ads will stop being thought of as a format and start being recognized as an entire system of growth. The brands that prepare for that reality now, by investing in creative automation and clean feeds, will be the ones that scale most efficiently.
When you strip away the feature lists and marketing claims, the decision between Hunch and Marpipe reflects a bigger choice in how brands approach catalog advertising. Do you want an orchestration suite that tries to manage campaigns for you, or a creative engine that strengthens the campaigns you already run?
For most performance marketers, the answer is clear. Success isn’t about layering on more automation rules, it’s about making every product ad smarter, sharper, and more effective. That means cleaner feeds, creative systems built for scale, and the ability to adapt quickly as platforms and consumer behavior evolve.
Hunch will remain relevant for a narrow set of enterprise advertisers with highly complex operations. But the growth story in 2025 belongs to the brands leaning into creative depth, not orchestration breadth. That’s where Marpipe has staked its ground, and why more marketers are aligning with a platform built for performance today and resilience tomorrow.
