News Briefs

DSW, Designer Shoe Warehouse, has launched a retailer media network called Front Row Connection, giving footwear and accessories brands additional opportunities to promote products on DSW.com.

The self-service platform offers “high-impact placements,” including sponsored product ads and banner ads designed to boost visibility on the digital shelf, according to a media release. The goal is to help brands highlight new arrivals and best sellers while making product discovery easier for shoppers.

Front Row Connection is operated by the Epsilon Retail Media platform, which applies AI-driven identity resolution in the ad server to connect brands with shoppers. It also provides “unified omnichannel attribution,” giving brands visibility into performance metrics and the ability to measure outcomes across digital and in-store channels.

“Front Row Connection gives our brand partners smarter, more direct access to the customers they care about most,” Mike Donk, senior vice president, digital at DSW, said in the release. “It’s designed to make discovery easier for shoppers and deliver measurable results for advertisers. This is about meeting consumers where they are and making the most of every moment on the digital shelf.”

“Brands like DSW are showing how retail media can evolve from static placement to smart performance,” added Adam Skinner, managing director of global unified retail media at Epsilon. 

DSW, which operates about 525 stores in the U.S. and Canada, is the flagship retail brand of Designer Brands Inc.

Criteo has unveiled a new integration with Google, becoming the search giant’s first on-site retail media partner.

The integration, initially launching in beta with select customers in the Americas, will allow advertisers to manage campaigns across Criteo’s retail media network directly through Google’s Search Ads 360. Plans are in place to expand the program globally and into additional Google Marketing Platform tools.

Criteo’s network includes more than 200 retailers worldwide. Through the first phase of the partnership, retailers can opt in to receive demand from advertisers running campaigns in Search Ads 360, while brands gain access to scaled on-site inventory and unified measurement capabilities. According to the companies, the collaboration is designed to help advertisers optimize spend, measure incremental impact and improve campaign performance.

“With Criteo’s expansive network of retailer partners, we’re helping advertisers connect with customers at a critical moment in their shopping journey: on-site, through sponsored product ads,” Bill Reardon, general manager, enterprise platform at Google, said in a media release. He noted that the integration complements Google’s existing off-site advertising solutions, including Performance Max and Shopping Ads.

“Our goal is to empower advertisers and agencies with a more complete view of their advertising performance,” he added.

Sherry Smith, president of retail media at Criteo, said that the partnership will bring “scaled brand advertising to retailers on the Criteo platform,” while helping retailers maximize the value of their ad inventory.

Industry forecasts project retail media spend could reach $204 billion by 2027. While much of that spend is currently concentrated among a handful of major platforms, Criteo and Google said the new integration will help broaden opportunities for both retailers and brands across the ecosystem.

The beta program is available to select advertisers through their Google account teams.

Market research firm Circana has finalized its acquisition of Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) business, expanding its global footprint in marketing analytics and strengthening its measurement capabilities.

MMM specializes in advanced statistical modeling designed to help brands understand the incremental impact of their marketing investments across channels and touchpoints. The unit will be integrated into Circana’s Media team alongside NCSolutions (NCS), which Circana acquired in June.

Stuart Aitken, Circana president and CEO, said the addition underscores the company’s commitment to building the industry’s leading media measurement business. 

“Marketing mix modeling is fundamental to understanding true marketing effectiveness, and MMM's sophisticated analytics — combined with our existing assets — are expected to provide unparalleled insights into optimizing our clients’ marketing investments across every channel,” he said in a media release.

The integrated Circana Media team, led by Cara Pratt, president of global retail and media, will now offer a comprehensive measurement platform spanning media planning, targeting, in-flight optimization and post-campaign analysis. 

“This combination gives our clients the ability to understand not just what happened, but why it happened and how to optimize future investments for maximum impact,” Pratt said.

Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao said Circana is the “ideal owner” for MMM and NCS. “These best-in-class assets and teams can now unlock immense opportunity for customers as part of a fast-growing data, science, and technology powerhouse on the leading edge of the industry,” he said.

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.