News Briefs

Retail marketing firm Neptune Retail Solutions is acquiring Quotient Technology, the parent company of Coupons.com, for $430 million in cash.

The merger will bring together Quotient’s technology platform, extensive digital promotions retail network and proprietary data with Neptune’s broad in-store network and data-driven shopper marketing insights across in-store and print media.

Charlesbank Capital Partners, a private investment firm and current majority investor of Neptune, will be the majority investor of the combined company, Neptune and Quotient announced in a June 20 media release. Neptune CEO William E. Redmond Jr. (Bill Redmond) will be CEO of the combined business.

“Today’s announcement is an exciting next step in our journey in the growing retail media industry and enables us to create more scale as a combined company,” said Matt Krepsik, CEO of Quotient. “Neptune and Charlesbank are ideal partners for Quotient, and we look forward to entering into this new chapter.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2023, at which point Quotient will cease to be a publicly traded company.

“Quotient's merger into Neptune unites two retail marketing innovators and represents a milestone that builds on our successful May 2020 carve-out of News America Marketing, and the transformative operational focus and growth spearheaded by Bill Redmond that created Neptune as it exists today,” Brandon White, managing director of Charlesbank, added.

Quotient Technology was founded in 1998 and operates marketing platforms offering consumers digital promotions. The company partners with advertisers, publishers and retailers, including Clorox, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, CVS Pharmacy, Dollar General, Ahold Delhaize USA, Amazon and Microsoft.

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Quotient also has offices across the U.S. as well as in Bangalore, Paris, London and Tel Aviv.

Neptune Retail Solutions’ platform includes in-store marketing rights in North America’s top grocery, dollar and drugstores, including Ahold, Albertsons, CVS, Family Dollar, Kroger, Loblaws, Publix, Rite-Aid, Southeastern Grocers and Walgreens. It also owns and operates cashback app Checkout 51, generating first-party shopping data via receipt scans from key retail locations across the U.S. and Canada.

EnsembleIQ, the parent company of the Path to Purchase Institute, has been recognized as one of the “Best Companies for Career Growth” by workplace evaluation firm Comparably.

This honor was based on ratings voluntarily and anonymously submitted to Comparably by EIQ employees between May 2022 and May 2023. The survey asked questions about the company’s professional development opportunities in areas including meaningful career advancement, mentorship, challenging work and frequency of valuable feedback from direct managers on how to improve. 

“Our employees are the lifeblood of our company,” EIQ CEO Jennifer Litterick said in a company media release. “As our most valuable asset, we are committed to investing in their careers. We believe in creating a positive culture that encourages, supports and celebrates our employees. Promoting from within boosts morale, energizes employees and enhances our organizational intelligence–improving our performance. We are proud to be recognized by Comparably as a top company for career growth.”

Previously, EIQ was honored by Comparably in 2022 as a “Best Place to Work in Chicago,” where the company is headquartered in, and in the “Best Leadership Teams” category, for driving a positive culture change.

Additionally, in Canada, EIQ is featured in “The Career Directory 2023,” which tells recent graduates that EIQ is a great place to start their careers.

Seattle-based AdsPostX has launched OmniSDK, a solution enabling retailers to monetize behavioral and intent signals across a shopper’s journey, according to a media release. The solution factors in the most opportune moments to serve applicable ads and offers across the path to purchase and beyond.

AdsPostX is a post-transaction ad platform that delivers personalized offers through proprietary targeting technology Nexos. Its OmniSDK technology collects sophisticated signals with rich insights for more relevant actions and campaign optimization, per the release. As a result, the upper-funnel technology aims to deliver incremental growth from the virtual front door to post-transaction.

The smart serving signals can indicate relevancy for product pairings to cross-promote based on items being browsed. While grocers and CPG brands have successfully cross-merchandised items for years in brick-and-mortar stores, OmniSDK helps retailers do the same thing but with more personalization online in real time, per the release.

“There are many signals across the shopper journey that can be collected to determine and deliver relevant offers and ads at key moments,” Roj Niyogi, chief product officer at AdsPostX, said in the release. “This moves beyond basic keyword and cart history data, leveraging site location and dwell time on product pages and many other advanced signals based on shopper behavior to offer up smart media placements. Our drop-in, small-footprint OmniSDK provides the ability to easily unlock relevancy factors that will mature retail media into a new era and provide true incremental growth opportunities for brands and retailers alike.”

The OmniSDK is open to retailers looking to extract learnings that occur within online shopping moments across the path to purchase, such as pre-checkout, browsing patterns, reviews and returns.

Earlier this year, CitrusAd and AdsPostX partnered to enable retailers to provide relevant ads throughout a customer’s complete shopping experience, including the confirmation page after they checkout.

British-based cosmetics and skincare brand Revolution Beauty and joined forces with Epic Games to bring to market a "Fortnite" beauty collaboration inspired by the sandbox game. The limited-edition “Revolution Beauty x Fortnite” collection launched exclusively on May 27 at Walmart stores and online via the retailer’s website and RevoltuionBeauty.com.

Fortnite’s first foray in the health and beauty space, the Revolution Beauty x Fortnite collection spans 27 products, including skincare, cosmetics and product applicators such as beauty blenders and brushes. The collection was inspired by the game and its popular characters (e.g., Peely, Supply Llama and Cuddle Team Leader) and appeals to both the players behind the game's 500 million-plus registered accounts worldwide and Revolution Beauty's customer base, according to a media release.

"Pairing Revolution Beauty's competitively priced and high-quality products with this globally recognized game for their first-ever beauty collaboration, we are appreciative of the opportunity to engage with this incredible gaming community that also values creative freedom and color play,” Sara Staniford, president of Revolution Beauty USA, said in the release.

The collection’s “key SKUs” include the Peely banana mousse mask, the Supply Llama 9 pan shadow palette and the Cuddle Team Leader nail polish, according to the release. Each product in the collection is priced at $12 and under and is cruelty free.

Wakefern Food Corp., the supermarket co-op and parent company of ShopRite, Price Chopper and The Fresh Grocer, is expanding usage of Freeosk’s interactive sampling kiosks to increase its multisensory retail media activations in stores.

Following a successful pilot, Wakefern is placing Freeosk display units in 95 ShopRite and The Fresh Grocer stores, according to a media release. The kiosks serve as in-store “discovery destinations” for new products and categories. They offer digital media space via large touchscreens as well as provide secondary merchandising space for product and dispense free samples.

According to the company’s release, Freeosk campaigns generate an average sales lift of about 50%, with 70% of buyers being new to the brand and 20% of the converted shoppers repeating purchases post-campaign. 

“Trial lowers barriers to entry for products and expands the shopper base for brands by attracting incremental users to the category while in-store,” Natalie Menza-Crowe, director of marketing and wellness strategy for Wakefern, said in the release. “By capturing the shopper activity, brands are provided transparent measurement and retail media opportunities to engage with emerging and renewed brand users.”  

According to Merkel’s 2022 Retail Media Research Report, just 9% of U.S. retail media networks offer in-store digital media for brand campaigns. However, that number is poised to grow as the connected store experience trends upward and more retailers and brands look to offer a more comprehensive approach to retail media offerings, including with multisensory in-store activations.

Publicis Groupe’s CitrusAd has introduced keyword bidding to help brands and advertising agencies enhance their campaigns and retail media strategies.

With the new bid-by-keyword capability, which is expected to go live in June, marketers will be able to include multiple bid strategies on each keyword within a single campaign, according to a media release.

Keyword bidding, also known as a pay-per-click (PPC) bid, represents the amount of money you are willing to spend for a single click on a given keyword or group of keywords to help secure top ad placements of search results.

CitrusAd offers a unified, self-serve platform that delivers shopper-relevant advertising experiences on commerce websites and across the open web.

The CitrusAd platform, powered by Epsilon, already suggests appropriate keywords and allows the advertiser to choose all keywords, while also showing the performance of each keyword within campaigns, with visibility into share of voice and percentage of impressions won. Now, brands and agencies can run campaigns on CitrusAd and optimize based on the performance of selected keywords. 

This new functionality is the first in a series of platform enhancements that CitrusAd is rolling out to help brands and advertisers easily create and manage campaigns.

“While a campaign may have had a [cost-per-click] bid across the board initially, it was incredibly clear on our platform that some keywords are more valuable to marketers than others,” Adam Skinner, managing director, retail media networks, CitrusAd, said in the release. “The new bid-by-keyword capability, allows marketers to weigh their campaigns by the most effective keywords for profitable results.”