Australian retail media platform Zitcha has partnered with Pentaleap, a unified product ranking layer, to better connect advertising decisions to what actually sells.
Retail media gained credibility by adopting the language of advertising: impressions, reach, click-through rates. To merchants who ran on sell-through, velocity, and margin, these were foreign. The auction rewarded the highest bid and the strongest ROAS. Sponsored products were ranked one way and organic products another, so a brand could win the auction and leave the shelf promoting a product that hurt margin. The data that merchants had trusted for decades never reached the ranking.
This new partnership addresses these gaps, drawing on Pentaleap’s unified ranking layer for organic and sponsored products and Zitcha’s merchant-decisioning model. Together, they create a retail-grade orchestration model that ensures sponsored and organic products not only compete in a single ranking system, but now the winning bid is directly tied to what moves on the shelf. This provides retailers with a decoupled, stack designed to drive margin-positive outcomes, based on relevance and what’s most likely to result in a sale.
Central to the integration is Margin Manager, Zitcha’s connection to the merchant. Pentaleap manages the auction layer, governing what gets ranked and served and connecting demand from multiple sources, including ad servers, DSPs, and major platforms such as Teads and Amazon Ads, with media decisions tied to product margin outcomes at the product level feeding directly into what it ranks and serves. The system is ad-stack agnostic and privacy-adherent, running inside the retailer’s own data environment.
The combined solution is designed to plug into the systems retailers already have, such as search, personalisation, demand partners, and existing campaign UIs, and improve them step by step rather than replace them all at once. The result is an offering built to grow retail, with media inside it.
“For too long, retail media networks have operated in isolation using digital advertising metrics that do not speak the language of the merchant. Our partnership with Pentaleap introduces a shared language. By infusing margin-aware insights into the media workflow, we ensure retail and media grow together while producing evidence that retailers can trust,” said Troy Townsend, co-founder and CEO of Zitcha.
“The ranking decision is the moment of truth. If organic and sponsored products are ranked by separate systems, neither can be optimised. Pentaleap rewrites that decision so organic and sponsored products are judged against the same standard of relevance, media performance, and product margin. Partnering with Zitcha delivers a best-in-class stack that plugs into existing retail systems to improve them incrementally,” concluded Andreas Reiffen, co-founder and CEO of Pentaleap.
