News Briefs

Jivox has rebranded to DaVinci Commerce, the namesake of its marketing platform.

The name change reflects the company's plan to lead the next era of commerce marketing. It describes the era as AI agents working alongside humans to accelerate execution — without sacrificing trust or control.

The company also announced in a news release that it raised a strategic round of financing to invest in the growth of its AI-native DaVinci Commerce platform.

The platform is designed to help large global brands and commerce media networks scale consumer engagement and acquisition through agentic commerce marketing.

DaVinci Commerce was recognized as a Top 50 innovation at the 2026 National Retail Federation (NRF) Innovators Showcase.

Commerce media continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments in digital advertising, based on eMarketer's May 2025 forecast projecting U.S. commerce media ad spend at a 15.3% CAGR from 2025–2029.

While eMarketer's forecast reflects the scale and pace of category growth, market adoption is widely understood to be shaped by broader industry dynamics, including the increasing convergence of commerce media, programmatic buying and closed-loop measurement.

At the same time, enterprises are rapidly adopting AI — and increasingly, agentic AI — to automate complex, multi-step workflows that previously required significant human coordination.

"Commerce media growth is no longer limited by media spend but constrained by the ability to handle speedy launches, multi-retailer complexity and compliance," said Diaz Nesamoney, DaVinci Commerce founder & CEO, in the news release. "We built the DaVinci Commerce platform from the ground up to be AI-native, enabling brands to lower the cost and complexity of creating and running commerce campaigns across multiple retail media networks while improving performance through personalized commerce ads — all with enterprise-grade guardrails.

“As demand for agentic commerce marketing continues to accelerate, we raised this round of financing to further invest in product innovation and expand our go-to-market efforts."

WHSmith North America is scaling its airport retail media ambitions through a new partnership with Mood Media’s In-Store Marketplace (ISM), bringing programmatic activation to its growing in-store media network across U.S. airports.

Through the collaboration, WHSmith North America Media Network (WHS Media), which is managed by SMG, will deploy ISM’s centralized retail media platform alongside Mood Media’s in-store hardware to unify digital screens and audio into a single, fully managed ecosystem. The rollout will span 350+ airport stores, activating approximately 700 digital screens and audio channels to reach high-value travelers during extended dwell times.

The move enables WHSmith to move beyond traditional digital-out-of-home (DOOH) placements and toward DSP-style, programmatic buying, allowing advertisers to access the entire network through a single point of entry. It also enables WHSmith to monetize in-store screens and audio assets.

Early adopters including PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay and Bose are already live on the network, with additional brands expected to follow.

The partnership underscores WHSmith’s push to position its airport footprint as a premium retail media environment, capitalizing on affluent, high-intent travelers and transforming in-store touchpoints into a cohesive media channel for brands.

Canadian home improvement retailer Rona is working with Google Cloud to enhance its artificial intelligence impact across all its operations and accelerate its growth through the cloud. 

"We are automating our processes, modernizing our retail operations and enhancing the customer experience by integrating cutting-edge technologies such as Google Distributed Cloud Edge and AI," J.P. Towner, president and CEO at Rona Inc., said in a news release. 

"We are rethinking the ways our stores operate, how our teams interact with customers, and how technology can support every stage of the in-store experience. Google Cloud’s expertise will be of great benefit to us, to our customers and to our employees," added Martin Thibodeau, senior vice president and CIO for Rona. 

Rona is also offering quick delivery with DoorDash, making thousands of items available for purchase through the platform. "We are eliminating the barrier between store and customer by innovating and making home improvement more accessible, more connected and quicker," Towner added. 

Rona overhauled its approach to search engine advertising to offer customers a more customized experience at each step of their shopping journeys, letting them find SKUS they're looking for and also offering solutions best suited to their projects. "By leveraging real-time data and historical performance, we can now optimize our advertising investments according to demand and market trends," said Catherine Laporte, chief digital and marketing officer at Rona. "Artificial intelligence plays a pivotal role in the dynamic adjustment of our strategies, enabling us to react even more rapidly to changes in consumer behavior and easily identify unforeseen fluctuations in demand."

Rona operates more than 425 stores under the Rona, Rona+ and Dick's Lumber banners. In recent years it has invested in streamlining its supply chain, growing its private brands, positioning itself among construction professionals and growing brand awareness through marketing and store conversions. 

Uber Advertising has launched Uber Intelligence, a data and insights platform designed to help brands better understand consumer behavior through real-world actions. 

Developed in partnership with LiveRamp, the platform combines Uber’s consented, pseudonymized data with advertisers’ own customer information — while maintaining privacy and governance standards, per a media release.

The platform aggregates insights from Uber’s mobility and delivery services, giving marketers a clearer view of how people move, dine, travel and order. By revealing patterns and audience behaviors that Uber says traditional datasets can’t capture, Uber Intelligence allows brands to make smarter marketing decisions grounded in real-world behavior rather than just clicks.

“For years, brands have been chasing signals that keep disappearing,” Edwin Wong, global head of measurement at Uber Advertising, said in the release. “What they really need is a way to understand people through how they live, not just how they click. … Uber Intelligence transforms the customer view with connections that are human, contextual, measurable and anonymized.”

Key features of Uber Intelligence include:

• Audience Overlaps: Identify overlapping customers to improve targeting and uncover growth opportunities.
• Advanced Insights: Unlock behavioral patterns to inform smarter campaign strategies.
• Segmentation: Build precise audience segments for higher engagement and reach.
• Activation: Create joint audiences that drive conversions and ROI.
• Measurement: Tie ad exposures to sales data for actionable attribution insights.

Currently available in the U.S., Uber Intelligence leverages the LiveRamp clean room to deliver these insights securely without exposing user-level data.

“As marketers look to transform how they engage customers, Uber Intelligence represents a new era of collaboration,” added Vihan Sharma, chief revenue officer at LiveRamp. 

Bay Cities Packaging & Design is expanding its Midwest operations with two major moves aimed at strengthening client service, production capacity and speed-to-market.

The company is relocating its Midwest packout, fulfillment and logistics facility to a new site in Oak Forest, Illinois. Bay Cities described the location as a “state-of-the-art” operation that will support continued growth and improve operational efficiency.

The move follows the recent opening of an office in Blue Ash, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati, in November. 

Bay Cities said in a company blog post that the Cincinnati office was established to better serve clients across the Midwest and East Coast by offering greater proximity, faster turnaround times and expanded services. The site brings together the company’s full suite of capabilities, including:

• Graphic and structural design.
• Project management.
• Sales support.
• Color mockup production and digital printing.
• Retailer execution expertise.

The office also provides strategic access to major retailers in the region, including Cincinnati-based Kroger.

“Our expansion into Cincinnati reflects Bay Cities’ commitment to creativity, customer intimacy and being exactly where our clients need us,” said Greg Tucker, chairman and CEO of Bay Cities. “This new location allows us to deliver on our concept-to-completion model — helping brands win with their retailers, their suppliers and ultimately, their customers.”

Leadership and Next Steps

The Cincinnati operation is led by Jeff Craig, senior vice president of sales. According to the company, the team is focused on developing new partnerships and providing faster prototyping, rapid response times and enhanced retail expertise.

Both the Oak Forest relocation and Blue Ash office opening are part of Bay Cities’ broader strategy to expand where client demand is growing and reinforce its end-to-end packaging and retail execution capabilities.

Beverage alcohol data company Jenda has introduced Executive Intelligence 2.0, an upgraded platform designed to give suppliers and distributors a daily, national view of commercial conditions across more than 60,000 off-premise retail locations. The platform is now rolling out broadly after a limited beta program. 

Jenda was recently described by an industry leader as the “Moneyball for BevAlc” for its ability to surface undervalued opportunities and reveal hidden risks at the outlet level, according to a media release.

For years, BevAlc suppliers have relied largely on delayed or incomplete insight into store-level pricing, assortment and competitive activity. Executive Intelligence 2.0 seeks to close that gap by providing daily assessments of how brands are positioned to win or lose across retail accounts, mirroring real shopper experiences and focusing on the factors that most influence purchase decisions — including presence, availability and price, per the release.

“Executive Intelligence 2.0 gives leadership teams a clear view of what’s happening across the country today and the ability to act on it,” said Harry Shulman, CEO of Jenda. “This new tool replaces assumptions with accuracy and provides suppliers with the clarity needed to compete in a complex environment.”

Key Features of Executive Intelligence 2.0

The expanded platform unifies Jenda’s commercial data into an executive-level interface designed to highlight the most important dynamics affecting performance. Core components include:

Nationwide Portfolio Health: A national assessment of execution fundamentals, surfacing markets and retailer groups where conditions are strong as well as areas where weaknesses — such as recurring out-of-stocks, distribution gaps or misaligned price positions — are creating risk.

Pricing Alignment & Market Visibility: A consolidated view of retail pricing across tens of thousands of outlets, signaling where pricing aligns with intended brand strategy and where mismatches may be slowing performance or squeezing margin.

Share Capture Opportunities: Identification of markets and retailer groups where competitive vulnerabilities — including sustained availability lapses, reduced shelf presence or disadvantageous pricing — create immediate potential to capture share.

Execution Issues & Early Indicators: “High level” detection of emerging issues related to distribution, availability, pricing and competitive pressure, offering leadership early visibility into problems.

“Our partners want immediate visibility into the signals that impact today’s performance,” Shulman added. “Executive Intelligence 2.0 is designed to surface those priorities.”