News Briefs

Ahold Delhaize USA’s (ADUSA) retail media arm is enhancing the way shoppers engage with products at the point of purchase. 

AD Retail Media has partnered with Inmar Intelligence, a technology and media solution provider, to add digital incentives to in-store advertising for CPG partners at Food Lion, The Giant Company, Giant Food, Hannaford and Stop & Shop stores, according to a media release. 

The ad solutions build on ADUSA’s recent partnership with Inmar to improve personalization and the omnichannel experience by enhancing its digital coupons. Inmar replaced Neptune Retail Solutions (formerly Quotient) as the retail group’s exclusive digital coupon provider.

Leveraging Inmar’s technology, this new collaboration will combine category-relevant creative strategies and the ability to reach shoppers during influential moments in their shopping journey. The partners believe that providing shoppers an immediate and compelling reason to act will help brands capture shoppers’ attention and drive engagement at the shelf.

Additionally, Inmar’s measurement tools will provide CPG companies with insights to measure the impact of their in-store advertising investment on shopper outcomes.

“In-store advertising continues to be a vital component of our retail media strategy, enabling our CPG partners to effectively engage customers with relevant product information,” Bobby Watts, senior vice president of AD Retail Media, said in the release.

“By integrating in-store advertising with incentives, we are creating a seamless path to purchase that not only enhances visibility but also drives shopper action,” added Rob Weisberg, president & EVP, martech solutions, Inmar. “This collaboration with AD Retail Media empowers CPG brands to engage customers with relevant promotions at key decision-making moments, ultimately strengthening brand connections and delivering measurable results.”

Koddi, a retail and commerce media technology company, has partnered with Checkatrade, a platform that connects U.K. homeowners with tradespeople, to enhance its advertising program. 

Leveraging Koddi’s commerce media technologies, the Checkatrade platform will offer tradespeople data-driven advertising solutions to help them attract potential clients with greater precision and optimize their spend, according to a media release. 

New enhancements also include personalized pricing strategies, enabling trade category-specific floor and ceiling prices designed to adapt to industry dynamics.

Additionally, Koddi’s score-based ad placements will help tradespeople reach relevant homeowners to maximize their visibility and ad effectiveness.

Checkatrade’s tradespeople will also gain access to performance insights, including metrics such as share of voice, time to live and performance by job category and location. These tools enable tradespeople to monitor and optimize their campaigns in real time.

Checkatrade has a network of more than 50,000 vetted trade businesses. 

“Our decision to partner with Koddi came down to a few key factors: product strength and team expertise,” Gabriella Overeem-Yee, managing director of innovation at Checkatrade, said in the release. “Koddi’s program management approach and high-calibre team provided confidence in ongoing support, particularly during the early stages of adoption.”

“The sheer volume of traffic on Checkatrade makes ad relevance essential to cut through the noise and stand out,” added Paul Dahill, managing director of EMEA sales at Koddi. “We focused on enhancing targeting, optimization and relevance to help tradespeople connect with more potential customers, gain deeper insights into their advertising performance and ultimately win more projects.”

The Fresh Market opened its first-ever Spirits & Wine store on March 7. 

The specialty grocer’s new adult beverages concept is located directly next door to The Fresh Market’s Ponte Vedra, Florida, grocery location. 

The store spans more than 7,000 square feet of retail space, stocking a wide selection of premium spirits, wines and craft beer as well as assorted mixers, snacks and glassware. Shoppers can also have a glass of wine from the in-store bar while they shop.

The Fresh Market calls the BevAlc experience “different from traditional liquor stores” as it offers a premium assortment, including organic wine, regional craft beer, imported charcuterie, sparkling wine, “top-shelf” liquors and a selection of international wines, per the retailer’s website.

Additionally, the store’s comprehensive wine selection ranges from European to domestic offerings as well as chilled beverage coolers.

“The opening of our Spirits & Wine store is an incredible opportunity to expand on our popular beverage program,” The Fresh Market CEO, Brian Johnson, said in a media release. “Our guests already trust us to provide the highest quality ingredients and finest flavors from around the world. Now, with our Spirits & Wine store, they can enjoy the same impeccable hospitality paired with our new, top-shelf beverage offerings to help make their shopping experience extraordinary.”

The Hershey Co. has named a new chief customer officer: Tiffany Menyhart, who will lead the company’s U.S. confection sales team.

Menyhart joins Hershey from Kraft Heinz, where she spent nearly five years managing strategic accounts and growth channels as area VP. Prior to that, she was the VP of U.S. category leadership at Mars Wrigley — a role in which she developed a category development strategy across all channels while accelerating category growth across the $7 billion U.S. confectionary business, according to LinkedIn. 

Her background includes diving into trends and analytics to develop merchandising strategies that drive conversion of incremental, basket-building products and transforming and upskilling teams. She was hired for her track record in driving growth and transformation and elevating retail partner relationships.

Andrew Archambault, president of U.S. confection at Hershey, said Menyhart’s extensive experience across confection and snacking categories will help the company focus on the customer while meeting the needs of retail partners and consumers. 

Archambault recently joined the company, tasked with overseeing brands such as Reese's and Jolly Rancher. He took over for Michael Del Pozzo, who departed the company on Dec. 12 after just a few months in the role. 

Menyhart's is the latest leadership announcement amid a series of moves following news that CEO Michele Buck would be retiring effective June 30, 2026.

Aldi is betting on automation to enhance and expedite the delivery of product descriptions on its digital touchpoints, including its website, mobile app and email.

Through a partnership with Digital Wave Technology, the discount grocer will leverage generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) solutions to create on-brand, customer-focused product copy and marketing content for Aldi’s digital channels in the U.S.

Digital Wave’s AI Copywriter creates precise, search-engine-optimized product descriptions and multilingual marketing copy. 

The AI Product Attribution solution extracts key product attributes from images and packaging, closing data gaps to improve digital discoverability, according to a media release.

The companies also said automated product attribution will increase search visibility, organic search rankings and website navigation, reducing customer confusion and improving operational efficiency.

“Our AI-native solutions will integrate with the existing Aldi digital infrastructure, driving revenue growth and improving profitability while delivering exceptional product experiences,” Lori Schafer, CEO of Digital Wave Technology, said in the release. “We’re excited to support Aldi as it continues to set benchmarks in the grocery sector.”

Jivox has launched a compliance tool that uses advanced AI automation to reduce delays caused by creative approvals in retail media ads. 

The marketing technology solution provider's Creative Compliance Checker minimizes the expensive and time consuming work involved in ensuring retail media ads are compliant with each retail media network guidelines on which the ads will run.

"The growing demand for retail media combined with the proliferation of retailers and retail media networks make creative approval a new and significant challenge for both retailers and advertisers," said Diaz Nesamoney, founder & CEO of Jivox, in a news release. "The solution lies in an autonomous approach to checking creative compliance by using AI to do the work for us — quickly and easily — that will help us save time while reducing costs and potential revenue loss."

The tool is powered by an agentic AI workflow that incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ensure that any retailer's guidelines are followed by any ad creative being analyzed.

Compliance rules, guidelines and ad specifications can be uploaded to the compliance checker in plain English text. Next, creative files can be uploaded for compliance checking. Within a few seconds, the tool produces a compliance score along with a report detailing rules that have not been adhered to, along with actionable insights about the creative.

"This tool further enables brands and agencies to scale up their retail media efforts without the lengthy back-and-forth creative approvals, the associated costs and potential loss of sales — all because they have not been able to launch promotional campaigns on time across multiple retailers," Nesamoney said in the news release.

The compliance checker ensures retailers and advertisers' efficiency by quickly flagging the most obvious non-compliant issues without having to deploy an army of people to do this work manually.

This capability is a significant new addition to Jivox IQ DaVinci, a platform that enables retailers and advertisers to generate creatives and activate retail media campaigns using pre-approved templates to ensure creative compliance from the start. Brands and agencies seeking bespoke creative can also use IQ DaVinci to develop them and then use the compliance checker to ensure that bespoke creatives also meet retailer creative compliance requirements.

Jivox is allowing each brand, agency and retailer user to test drive the tool at no charge.