News Briefs

Costco Wholesale has partnered with GrowthLoop to bolster the operations of its growing retail media business. 

Costco will leverage GrowthLoop’s Compound Marketing Engine, which uses agentic AI and enables marketers to build and activate audiences directly from the data cloud. 

The platform is designed to enhance personalization, increase speed to market and improve campaign performance while maintaining privacy and governance standards, according to a media release.

This partnership will equip Costco with a centralized system designed to help its retail media team work more efficiently and provide better service to advertisers seeking to provide relevant messaging (or content) to Costco's member base.

The system also aims to streamline campaign workflows, shortening months-long marketing cycles to just days. This gives Costco the ability to provide advertisers with more relevant and timely messaging opportunities targeted to its loyal member base.

The partnership underscores Costco’s continued investment in its retail media network, which — like other major retailers — has become an increasingly important driver of growth and a way to better connect brand partners with engaged shoppers.

Jivox has unveiled DaVinci Commerce, a solution designed to help brands and retail media networks through its agentic and generative AI capabilities.

DaVinci Commerce powers commerce media ads that work with shopper agents such as Perplexity's Buy with Pro, connecting shoppers with those AI platforms.

Future integrations with individual retail-specific shopping agents are also planned as they become available, according to a news release.

Agentic shopping delivers a direct creative-to-sale connection and gives brands the ability to achieve closed-loop ad campaign measurement. It enables the link from ad exposure to purchase, with attribution precision across multiple retailers. With that precision, brands can quantify incremental sales lift by way of A/B testing, distinguishing sales driven by the campaign from those that would have occurred anyway, and calculate true, incremental ROAS based on verified transaction data, according to the company. 

The end-to-end workflow of DaVinci Commerce is designed to enable brands to see the actual sales impact of every ad click-through, Jivox said. 

The platform uses a combination of generative and agentic AI to automate the entire workflow from creative generation to campaign activation. 

"Prior to deploying DaVinci Commerce, a global alcoholic beverage customer saw their creative production costs ballooning to 25% of their media spend for activating campaigns across 75 RMNs in 44 countries," Jivox founder and CEO Diaz Nesamoney said in the release. "Furthermore, the creative was not personalized with SKU-level product content because that would have further escalated the production costs. DaVinci Commerce helped them move the needle, by reducing the production costs to less than 6% of the media spend while accelerating cycle times from weeks to minutes. The result is significantly increasing campaign performance, thanks to generative AI templates and automated AI campaign optimization."

Jivox earlier this year launched a creative compliance tool and added API integrations with Amazon DSP and Walmart Connect DSP.

Pet Valu Holdings has chosen Greg Ramier as its new CEO. 

The Canadian pet goods retailer announced on Tuesday that its current president and chief operating officer would take the reins on Sept. 21, replacing retiring CEO Richard Maltsbarger. 

Ramier has been with the Markham, Ontario-based retailer since August 2024. Prior to that he was at Loblaw Cos., where he was the market division president. 

Once Ramier assumes the top executive role, Maltsbarger will serve as a senior adviser, assisting the leadership transition until he retires in April 2026. Maltsbarger has served as CEO for seven years, taking the company through the COVID-19 pandemic, when pet ownership skyrocketed. During that period, Pet Valu doubled its revenues and grew its store network to more than 800 locations. Eventually it aims to have 1,200 stores. 

The succession news followed Pet Valu recording a second-quarter profit of 21.8 million Canadian dollars, up from CA$17.8 million for the same period a year ago, with rerevenues climbing from CA$265.2 million to CA$280.6 million.

PetSmart has appointed Jesica Duarte as executive vice president and chief commercial officer, the retailer announced on Aug. 4. She will lead the merchandising, marketing, digital, proprietary brands and merchandise planning and allocation teams.

The move is part of a broader strategy to accelerate growth and enhance the customer experience, according to the company.

“[Duarte] is a strategic and growth-minded leader, with an impressive career tenure working across successful retail brands,” Ken Hicks, PetSmart president and CEO, said in a media release. “She has led teams through significant business and process transformations, while delivering strong business results.”

Duarte brings more than 30 years of experience across the retail, grocery, beauty and beverage industries. Most recently, she served as group vice president of national merchandising at Albertsons Cos, which she departed from in 2024. 

She previously spent nearly 12 years at Walmart in a variety of leadership roles, including VP of private brands for general merchandise, VP of product development and sourcing for home, chief merchandising and marketing officer for Walmart Chile, and director of marketing for Walmart U.S.

Earlier in her career, Duarte held merchandising and marketing roles at Molson Coors Beverage Company, Beam Suntory, Estee Lauder and J.C. Penney.

“This is an exciting time at PetSmart, and I’m thrilled to be joining this impressive team at such a pivotal time in the business,” Duarte said in the release. “I’m equally pleased to bring together my own passions for merchandising, marketing and meeting the customer where they are with omnichannel capabilities.”

Duarte, who is a native of Chile, holds an MBA from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in business and economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also an advocate for the Hispanic community and previously served as chair of the Idaho Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

DoorDash has partnered with National Retail Solutions (NRS) to help small, independent retailers streamline e-commerce operations and reach more customers through the delivery platform.

Announced July 23, the integration leverages DoorDash’s retail APIs to automate online ordering directly through the NRS point-of-sale system and merchant portal. Retailers can now manage orders, sync inventory in near real time and fulfill deliveries without juggling multiple systems.

“This important partnership allows [local] businesses to thrive in the face of uncertainty,” Elie Y. Katz, CEO and president of NRS, said in a media release. “Automating access to DoorDash’s marketplace ensures merchants are able to present all of their available products … for seamless preparation and fulfillment.”

The nationwide rollout is initially focused on liquor retailers, with early participants already seeing positive results, per the release. Future plans include expanding access to more store types in the NRS network, which spans thousands of independent grocers, convenience stores and specialty retailers.

The move aligns with DoorDash’s broader push to support local businesses and opens up new omnichannel opportunities for brands and retailers looking to drive product availability in smaller-format, community-based stores.

Criteo and Mirakl Ads have unveiled a global integration designed to help retailers activate advertising from third-party sellers and “mid- to long-tail” advertisers — a hard-to-reach segment in retail media despite its collective buying power, the companies said in a media release.

The integration combines Criteo’s ad-serving and retail media technology with Mirakl Ads’ access to a large ecosystem of third-party sellers, enabling more efficient, scalable campaign execution through AI automation, unified workflows and self-service capabilities.

Criteo said the collaboration targets a growing need among retailers to reach advertisers who are eager to invest in retail media but fall outside typical sales and media management channels. Smaller brands and marketplace vendors may lack internal media buying resources, but research cited by the companies suggests they represent significant opportunity — spending 127% more than first-party brands on Amazon, for example.

“Together we enable third-party advertisers to easily launch campaigns, boosting product variety without adding operational complexity to retailers,” Melanie Zimmermann, general manager of global retail media at Criteo, said in the release.

Mirakl Ads Global VP Octavie Gosselin said the integration helps "advertisers and sellers to seamlessly participate in all retail programs" and shows the "growing importance of marketplaces in the commerce ecosystem."