News Briefs

The Raley's Cos. has made several leadership appointments designed to bolster customer engagement, improve operations and position the company for continued growth. This latest round of changes was unveiled by Raley’s owner and CEO Mike Teel in partnership with Co-Presidents Tiffanie Burkhalter and Jen Warner. 

"The grocery industry is evolving rapidly, creating new opportunities to serve customers in better and more meaningful ways," Teel said. "These leadership appointments position us to build on our legacy of innovation, move with greater agility and help define the next chapter of The Raley's Cos."

As part of the leadership changes, Carol Barsotti has been named chief marketing officer, adding responsibility for marketing to her existing brief of communications, government affairs and community impact. Barsotti's expanded role reflects the company's belief that brand, customer connection and community impact are increasingly interconnected and best furthered through a unified strategy.

Meanwhile, Natalie Slatter has been promoted to SVP, enterprise operations. She is responsible for leading store operations across the company's banners, with a focus on supporting store teams, strengthening operational excellence and ensuring that customers continue to benefit from the Raley's long-standing service, care and engagement efforts.

Additionally, Levi Wingo has been promoted to SVP, sales and merchandising strategy. He heads up Raley's merchandising strategy, innovation, category growth and customer value initiatives. Wingo will help advance the products, offerings and experiences that keep the company customer-centric.

The appointments build on an established leadership team spanning the company's operating divisions. Its members include Paul Gianetto, president of Raley’s; Faith Garrard, VP of sales and merchandising for Raley’s; Jess Blakely, VP of sales and merchandising for Bashas'; and Ralph Woodward, SVP of operations for Bashas'.

Amazon Ads has expanded its Omnichannel Metrics (OCM) offering with retailer-level reporting, giving U.S. advertisers new insight into which retailers their Amazon DSP campaigns are driving sales.

Earlier this year, OCM began providing product category-level breakouts. The latest update adds retailer-level units sold and sales metrics at both the campaign and study level, allowing advertisers to better understand where purchases occur outside the Amazon.com store.

According to Amazon Ads, the enhancement combines first-party Amazon Shopper Panel data with third-party signals to measure the impact of Amazon DSP campaigns beyond Amazon. The retailer-level reporting is based on exposure-based attribution, enabling marketers to identify where ad-exposed shoppers ultimately make purchases and optimize their omnichannel media strategies accordingly.

The feature is available to Amazon DSP self-service and managed-service advertisers in the U.S.

Conagra Brands selected Barrows as its commerce marketing agency of record following a competitive review.

The first Conagra programs from Barrow are expected to launch in late July.

Barrows will help elevate and connect Conagra's customer and shopper marketing efforts while improving digital shelf capabilities into a single, connected commerce system that delivers growth, consistency and performance across retailers and e-commerce platforms.

Working in lockstep with Conagra's leadership team, Barrows will build a connected commerce engine that integrates shopper marketing, retail media, product detail page (PDP) content and in‑store activation into a single system. This approach is designed to improve conversion, increase share of shelf and scale best practices across Conagra's diverse portfolio of iconic brands.

Leveraging the broader WPP Enterprise Solutions network and the WPP Open ecosystem of tools, data and technology, Barrows will partner with Conagra to transform its commerce practice, deploying new tools and capabilities that accelerate insight, planning and go‑to‑market execution.

"Barrows stood out for their retailer intelligence, their ability to connect shopper, digital shelf and retail media into a single system, and their access to the broader WPP Enterprise Solutions and WPP Open ecosystem," said Lisa Matos, VP, sales capabilities and commerce at Conagra Brands. "Together, we’re excited to build a more modern, insight‑driven commerce engine that will help our brands win at shelf and deliver measurable growth with our retail partners across the U.S."

Barrows will bring to Conagra a robust combination of retailer intelligence, commerce creativity and the ability to orchestrate seamlessly in-market.

"By reframing commerce into a single, connected and tightly synchronized system we can elevate Conagra end-to-end shopper and customer strategy," Barrows CEO Kristina Kovar said. "Our approach brings sharper insight into who we’re targeting, why they buy and how to win them at every shelf. Critically, through creative effectiveness especially behind Conagra’s biggest innovations, we are delivering ideas that convert across the digital shelf, retail media and in‑store. We’re thrilled to bring this to life as we help drive Conagra’s growth at scale."

Ace Hardware is making it easier for brands to use RedVest Media, its retailer media network.

Through a collaboration via Pacvue’s integration with Epsilon, brands can now activate, manage and optimize Ace Hardware campaigns directly within Pacvue. This can be done from a single platform alongside existing investments across Amazon, Walmart and other major retail media networks.

The move addresses the issue of brands often managing media across national platforms while trying to maintain a presence in specialty retail environments where project-driven customers actually convert.

Eliminating the operational overhead of managing Ace as a standalone channel reduces manual work. It gives teams more time to act on insights rather than compile them.

Benefits of the integration include connecting Ace Hardware performance to a unified reporting view, with cross-retailer dashboards that make it easier to compare results, identify trends and roll up performance across the full portfolio.

Brands can also apply automation and rules-based optimization to RedVest Media campaigns, including bid management and budget pacing.

"Our differentiation in the industry comes from our 5,200-store scale, the convenience of our locations, the helpfulness of our store staff, and the strength and trust we've built through our Loyalty Program, Ace Rewards," said Molly Hjelm, corporate VP and GM of RedVest Media at Ace. "By partnering with Pacvue, advertisers now have the ability to engage our customer in a way that fits into their broader retail media approach, making it even more seamless to engage the Ace customer and providing more ways to activate their RedVest Media campaigns."

Ace Hardware has 5,200 locally owned and operated stores in the United States. Half of all Americans live within 3 miles of an Ace and 75% live within a 15 minute drive. Its loyalty program, Ace Rewards, consists of more than 70 million lifetime members and provides a strong backbone for RedVest Media.

Instacart has launched a new pilot as part of its suite of inspiration ads.

Dubbed “Immersive Feed,” the short-form, vertical video feed showcases meals and recipes. Customers can now browse the video feed directly within a retail storefront on Instacart and seamlessly add items to their cart.

Immersive Feed is available as 9:16 vertical video between 5 and 30 seconds in length. It is currently in early pilot with curated content and select brand partners, including Hellmann's, Kettle & Fire, Rachael Ray Nutrish and Siete Foods.

The company plans to expand the offering to more partners later this year.

Immersive Feed is designed to boost discovery, drive engagement and unlock incremental reach across the Instacart Ads ecosystem. Content in the Immersive Feed will be provided by Instacart’s 9,000-plus brand partners, with plans to expand to organic content through third-party partnerships and sponsored creator integrations. 

Brand partners can launch Immersive Feed campaigns directly through Instacart's Ads Manager using existing vertical video assets or by creating new ones themselves. 

“Snackable vertical video has transformed how people get inspired with new recipes or the latest food trends to bring into their kitchen,” said Ali Miller, general manager of advertising at Instacart. “Our Immersive Feed brings that familiar experience directly into our shopping journey.”

DaVinci Commerce is enhancing its solution for agentic shopping to extend across the entire consumer journey on AI platforms.

Known as DaVinci Agentic BrandStore Enterprise, the platform introduces an AI-powered Content Enrichment Engine to add conversational context to product content, driving precise brand and product discoverability across large language models (LLMs) with added support for GEO (generative engine optimization), ACP (agentic commerce protocol) and UCP (universal commerce protocol).

The Content Enrichment Engine is a core component of DaVinci Commerce's platform. It takes a brand's existing product catalog and enriches every SKU with contextual intelligence drawn from multiple sources simultaneously using a scalable swarm of content agents: 

• Verified customer reviews
• Social conversations from Reddit and YouTube
• Consumer intent signals from GEO platforms 
• Lifestyle content from brand websites 
• And real-time data on what questions consumers are actually asking LLMs. 

The engine uses a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and context engineering architecture to keep answers accurate, current and calibrated to specific consumer queries.

The Discovery Problem

The announcement comes as AI platforms cross from novelty into commerce infrastructure. ChatGPT processes 50 million shopping-intent queries every day and has reached 900 million weekly active users, a number that doubled in 12 months. 

Traffic from AI sources to U.S. retail sites grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, according to Adobe Analytics, and that traffic converts 42% better than non-AI traffic. The change is real and growing, but many brands remain almost entirely undiscoverable.

Product content was written for search engines. Consumers have conversations with LLMs.

When a consumer asks ChatGPT, "I'm going to a friend's wedding this weekend and it might get a little hot, what should I wear?" they are not searching for a product by name. They are describing a need. Most product content is structured for search — not conversations — and optimized for keyword search, not equipped to answer that question. 

Ingredients, technical specs and product names do not map directly to how consumers converse with AI agents. If the product content doesn't match how the question is asked, the brand does not get found.

Brands that submit existing product data directly to ACP or UCP feeds or use only that data to enrich PDP (product detail page) content on their sites, are finding it falls short. Product listings describe what something is. 

They don't capture how it's actually used, what customers say about it, or the conversational context that determines whether an LLM surfaces it in response to a real consumer query. That missing context is why enrichment from the product feed alone doesn't work.

"LLMs are where many consumers start their shopping journeys," Diaz Nesamoney, founder and CEO of DaVinci Commerce, said. "Consumers are on these platforms asking questions about their needs, and brands need to be there from discovery to purchase. To be discoverable requires contextually enriched product content: ACP/UCP/GEO to get you found, and a branded storefront experience to get you chosen. All these together can make first-movers the category leader on these platforms."

Transforming Raw Product Data to Conversation-Ready Metadata

The enriched content has two distinct outputs, which serve two fundamentally different functions. One is discovery layer for ACP, UCP and GEO. The other is an experience layer, which is vectorized, stored for easy retrieval to power the Answer Agent inside the Agentic Storefront. 

Unlike feed submissions, which are constrained by field limits and character caps, the Storefront has access to the full contextual dataset. CRM data, personalization context and proprietary brand content never leave DaVinci's platform. Only answers are shared with the LLM, not the underlying data.

Through the discovery feeds, DaVinci gives an LLM enough context to surface a brand's products via their product discovery tools. Through the Storefront's Answer Agent, DaVinci can answer virtually any question a consumer asks, matching it accurately to products because the full enriched dataset is available, in real time, without the constraints that govern feed submissions.

Support for Multiple LLMs and Chat Interfaces

With the addition of ACP and UCP support, BrandStore experiences can now be made available to LLM platforms like Gemini, Claude and can eventually be integrated into retailer agents like Alexa and Sparky when they support ingestion of enriched product content via UCP.

In addition, BrandStore now supports Website Chat integration via an MCP server that can bring all the Agentic BrandStore experiences and capabilities to a retailer- or brand-owned website or mobile app. This will also enable easy integration with emerging chat interfaces like WhatsApp and Instagram.