News Briefs

Giant Eagle is advancing its "Because It Matters" value strategy with a third-party retail media network.

The retailer tapped Ibotta to be its exclusive provider of digital promotions across its more than 200 supermarkets and digital platforms.

Giant Eagle's value strategy is a multiyear plan centered on delivering better everyday value and a modernized shopping experience for its communities.

By integrating with the Ibotta Performance Network, Giant Eagle will provide its shoppers with a larger, curated gallery of digital offers that significantly increases both the quantity and relevance of available savings compared to previous offerings.

Shoppers can expect the expanded offer sets to begin rolling out across Giant Eagle's digital footprint in the coming months.

For CPG brands, this transition provides a more efficient, high-impact path to reach a loyal grocery audience through a single, verified digital channel that delivers measurable outcomes at scale.

The Ibotta Performance Network gives retailers and publishers access to eight times the number of national CPG offers compared to leading competitors, providing daily savings directly to their shoppers.

The network also gives CPG brands a performance-based model where they pay only when a promotion results in a verified sale.

In joining the network, Giant Eagle becomes part of a select group of partners that includes Walmart, Instacart, DoorDash and Uber, among others.

"At Giant Eagle, our 'Because It Matters' strategy is our promise to prioritize what truly matters to our guests: Quality, service and meaningful value," said Justin Weinstein, executive vice president and chief merchandising and marketing officer at Giant Eagle.

Weinstein will deliver a keynote at P2PI's Retail Media Summit event on June 3 in Chicago.

Retailers often find it difficult to translate market share movement into direct action.

That's why Circana launched Market Share Drivers, a solution to help U.S. CPG retailers precisely identify the factors driving changes in their market share.

The solution provides advanced diagnostics that reveal the true causes of share change. It quantifies the specific levers that matter most to the business and clearly explains why market share shifted.

This allows retail teams to stop guessing and start implementing targeted, data-backed strategies.

The platform integrates Circana's Complete Market and Complete Consumer solutions while adding macroeconomic and weather data, plus out-of-specification (OOS) benchmarking.

The tool also delivers automated, presentation-ready outputs designed through the retailer's operational lens.

These outputs are easily customized for different internal audiences, ensuring that executive leadership, category managers, and retail operations all receive the specific insights they need to succeed.

"By bringing our most powerful data assets together into a single platform, we are doing the heavy lifting so you can focus on impact," said Cara Pratt, president of global retail and media at Circana.

Barrows Connected Store has appointed Becca Bocci as head of data and insights, North America.

Bocci will advance innovation across in-store analytics, with a focus on the metrics that matter most to brands, agencies and retailers. She will elevate the quality and consistency of client reporting and serve as a senior advisor to brands and retail partners on Connected Store performance.

In her role, Bocci will be a key part of evolving Barrows' measurement approach. This will ensure methodologies are rigorous, transparent and aligned with industry standards while partnering closely with product, engineering and data science teams to shape future capabilities.

Bocci also will represent Barrows in the marketplace as a thought leader in retail media measurement, contributing to industry dialogue and helping define best practices for in-store analytics.

"There is a significant opportunity to elevate how in-store performance is measured and understood, and I look forward to unlocking greater value for our clients using advanced, data-driven tools," Bocci said.

Bocci brings more than a decade of experience spanning early work at Triad, one of the pioneers in retail media, to most recently serving as a senior data scientist at Dynata and Nielsen.

"[Bocci's] ability to turn complex data challenges into valuable, scalable solutions makes her an exceptional addition to our team," said Tim Bagwell, chief product and data officer at Barrows Connected Store.

Barrows recently named Kathryn Mazza as chief growth officer, NA.

Topsort, an AI-native, auction-based retail media infrastructure company, has launched In-Store Ads, a self-service ad format that integrates physical retail inventory, specifically in-store digital screens, into the same self-service infrastructure used for on-site retail media. 

The capability addresses the operational bottlenecks and reliance on manual coordination that typically slow in-store programs. Now, marketplaces and advertisers can launch, manage and measure in-store campaigns faster, increase advertiser participation, improve inventory transparency and unify campaign management with their existing on-site media efforts. 

"Retail media teams are under pressure to scale new surfaces without increasing operational complexity," Regina Ye, CEO of Topsort, said in a media release. "In-store has always been valuable, but difficult to operationalize. By bringing it into the same self-service infrastructure, we're making it easier to activate, manage and scale."

Axonet, the convenience-store retail media network, announced a letter of intent to acquire RightSense AI, a provider of AI-driven analytics solutions supporting data-based decision-making.

Upon the acquisition's closing, Axonet would integrate RightSense's Fusion AI platform, technology, team and customer base into its operations.

The transaction supports Axonet's long-term vision to become a retail intelligence, media and measurement company, further strengthening its position at the intersection of retail media, data and technology.

By incorporating RightSense's tools, Axonet expects to reinforce the AI foundation of its ad-tech platform, Sophia AI, while also growing Axonet's retail intelligence capabilities.

The acquisition also expands Axonet's technical leadership with the planned appointment of RightSense CEO Sangam Sangameswara as Axonet's first CTO.

In this role, Sangameswara will lead Axonet's technology strategy and innovation roadmap across AI, data science and platform development.

RightSense and Axonet began working together last year, Sangameswara said in a statement. The acquisition reflects a shared vision to accelerate innovation and solve complex problems.

"RightSense's innovative approach to incorporating AI agents into impactful decision-making has impressed us since Day 1 of working with Sangam and [the] team," Axonet CEO Patrick Raycroft said.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of this year.

Instacart is now available as a connector in Claude, Anthropic’s conversational AI interface, enabling users to build a grocery cart while interacting with the chatbot — from a recipe, a weekly list or a prompt — with live inventory and personalization from an Instacart account. 

"Claude connects to Instacart’s experience, surfacing real options from nearby stores, with live product inventory and personalized results from your Instacart account," wrote Instacart CTO Anirban Kundu in a recent blog post. "Any cart you build stays in sync with your Instacart account, so you can pick up where you left off in our app or on our website whenever you’re ready to order."

Making this possible, according to Kundu, "is the intelligence layer Instacart has built over time. Millions of customers shopping across our platform have given us a deep understanding of how people actually buy groceries: what they substitute, what they won’t, where they shop and how. We also understand how preferences shift by season, occasion, and household through Smart Shop, our personalization engine. The experience isn’t generic — with Instacart’s understanding, it reflects your stores, your staples, your preferences. And that’s what you’ll see when you log in to Instacart in Claude."

He went on to describe Instacart as "the grocery infrastructure layer for agentic AI — present wherever the journey starts, whether that’s in our own app, through AI Solutions powering our retail partners’ digital experiences, or with AI assistants like Claude."

San Francisco-based Instacart partners with more than 2,200 retail banners — representing nearly 100,000 stores.