News Briefs

Chicago-based market research firm Circana has launched Liquid Activation, a solution that brands, agencies and media partners can use to build, customize and activate purchase-based audiences.

Liquid Activation takes verified consumer purchase data and behavioral insights and lets marketers size, build and distribute audiences in minutes, helping teams navigate modern media planning's rapid pace across a highly fragmented landscape. 

The Liquid Activation workflow takes Circana's cross-channel, cross-industry consumer intelligence — including verified signals from 200,000 static omnichannel receipt panelists and 500 million loyalty cards — and blends that data with deep panel insights, arming marketers with precise information and the ability to quickly size segments, combine diverse behavioral signals and push dynamic targeting strategies directly to media partners. 

"Our liquid activation solution transforms the way marketers approach audience creation," Cara Pratt, president of global retail and media at Circana, said in a news release. "By seamlessly integrating diverse data assets — including insights from all channels of trade, food service and receipt panels — brands and agencies can move swiftly from consumer understanding to precise audience activation. This innovation empowers our clients to connect with high-value consumers across industries with exceptional speed and accuracy."

The Liquid Activation solution helps brands reach high-value consumers across the entire marketing funnel by connecting consumer purchase data with media activation. It also integrates seamlessly across a wide range of publishers, media platforms and marketing technologies, providing flexibility and scale for consumer-informed audience targeting.

Meijer is partnering with retail media technology company Pentaleap to support a relevance-first approach to sponsored products within its retail media program.

The collaboration enables Meijer to unify organic results and sponsored placements within a single ranking framework, ensuring that relevance — not bid strength alone — determines what consumers see.

The result aims to be a sponsored search program that delivers stronger engagement and healthier advertiser outcomes without sacrificing shopper experience.

With Pentaleap, Meijer can launch new variants rapidly, make incremental changes and measure results, enabling a data-driven retail media operation, according to a news release.

The platform also supports orchestration across Meijer's existing demand partners, reinforcing an open ecosystem approach rather than vendor replacement.

Following a testing period, Meijer pursued a unified ranking approach across sponsored and organic products, using Pentaleap's ad server, while ensuring business continuity with their existing front-end technology.

"Retail media only works long term if it earns customer trust," Andreas Reiffen, Pentaleap CEO and co-founder, said in the release. "Meijer's approach shows that relevance isn't just better for shoppers — it's better for advertisers too. By giving teams full control to test, adjust and learn quickly, we're helping retailers prove that relevance-first strategies deliver sustainable outcomes."

The collaboration reflects a broader industry shift toward open, modular retail media stacks that prioritize interoperability, experimentation and long-term performance over short-term bid optimization.

Commerce agency Blue Chip has launched Radar, an AI-powered platform that offers marketers a free diagnostic assessment of their brand's ability to turn its marketplace presence into commercial momentum. 

By evaluating key market signals, Radar — accessible at BrandCommerceRadar.ai — establishes an instantaneous performance baseline and a Brand Commerce Index (BCI) score ranging from 0 to 100. This allows brands to compare their standing against trends and rivals in the same category.

Radar is publicly accessible, which gives marketers a transparent starting point to assess brand vitality without a contract or commitment to an agency's proprietary analytics tools.

Radar analyzes brands across six components that influence a brand's commerce performance:

• Media visibility
• Consumer conversation
• Search demand
• Digital authority
• Narrative alignment
• Commerce momentum

The six signals blend into the BCI, an executive-level measure of how well a brand translates awareness and relevance into commercial impact. 

"We built something real," Jamie Olson, president of Blue Chip, said in a news release. "Instead of keeping it behind closed doors, we're putting it in the hands of marketers. Radar provides an objective baseline for how effectively brand strength is turning into commercial performance, grounded in the signals that fuel sustained growth."

As AI accelerates marketing execution, Blue Chip believes clarity about what actually drives growth will be a key competitive advantage, and Radar's identification and measurement of those signals will help achieve that. 

Early usage has found that many brands overestimate their awareness strength while underestimating the commerce signals that drive conversion and sustain growth. 

Radar is part of Blue Chip's broader Brand Commerce framework and ImpactOS intelligence ecosystem.

Bay Cities has promoted longtime employee Sahar Mehrabzadeh to chief revenue officer.

In this newly created role, Mehrabzadeh oversees all revenue-generating functions and client-facing teams across the company, aligning them under a unified strategy to drive growth and enhance customer experience.

She will also focus on expanding Bay Cities' strategic retail relationships with partners including Walmart, Target, Costco, Home Depot and Lowe's along with newer partnerships such as H-E-B, Meijer and Albertsons.

The teams under Mehrabzadeh's leadership include sales, marketing, customer services, project management, supply chain and design.

Mehrabzadeh's promotion to CRO formally recognizes her as a company officer and positions her as the official successor to CEO Greg Tucker, according to a news release.

With 20 years at Bay Cities, Mehrabzadeh rose through the ranks from marketing manager to director of sales and EVP of sales.

Bay Cities contributed to P2PI's recent P-O-P showcase of best-in-class displays.

DaVinci Commerce has announced a solution to help brands create effective experiences for agentic shopping.

The product, called DaVinci Agentic BrandStore, delivers curated brand experiences, product content and shopping capabilities onto existing AI commerce infrastructure.

This is designed to enable seamless handoff to checkout on retailer websites and emerging agentic commerce protocols, according to a news release.

DaVinci Commerce also secured an investment through Accenture Ventures, including a strategic partnership with Accenture Song. Accenture will integrate DaVinci Commerce into various offerings to help brands and retailers deploy AI-native branded experiences in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and others.

DaVinci Commerce was previously known as Jivox before a formal rebrand in January.

Pacvue is giving brands a new way to activate and optimize Reddit Ads alongside retail media.

Pacvue and Reddit announced a partnership to integrate Reddit Ads into Pacvue’s Commerce Operating System. The offering is launching this spring for brands and agencies to plan, activate and optimize full-funnel performance at scale.

Reddit has 121 million daily active unique visitors to more than 100,000 active communities, according to the company. Ninety percent of its users say they trust the platform as a resource to learn about new products and brands, it said in a news release. 

The site provides opportunities for brands to tap into a high-intent, high-trust environment at key moments of discovery when consumers are actively seeking recommendations. By integrating Reddit Ads into Pacvue’s platform, the partnership is expected to make it easier for brands to leverage those opportunities across markets and alongside the rest of their full-funnel media mix.

In addition to unified reporting and measurement capabilities that offer cleaner rollups and faster insight delivery, the new integration enables:

• Enterprise-scale campaign management

• Advanced audience activation

• Budget governance and pacing control

• Automation and decision intelligence

• Creative intelligence built for community context