Melbourne, Australia – Australian retail media platform Zitcha has announced a partnership with unified product ranking provider Pentaleap, in a move aimed at helping retailers align advertising decisions with the products most likely to drive sales and profitability.
The collaboration seeks to address one of retail media’s longstanding challenges: the disconnect between media metrics and merchant priorities.
While retail media has increasingly adopted the language of digital advertising—focusing on impressions, reach, click-through rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS)—retailers have traditionally measured success differently, prioritising sell-through, product velocity, and margin performance.
As a result, sponsored products and organic listings have often been ranked separately, creating situations where products that perform well in ad auctions may not necessarily support broader commercial objectives.
Under the partnership, Zitcha and Pentaleap aim to bridge that divide through a unified ranking approach that evaluates sponsored and organic products within a single system.
The integration combines Pentaleap’s ranking technology with Zitcha’s merchant decisioning capabilities to ensure media investments are informed by factors such as product relevance, likelihood of conversion, and margin contribution.
At the centre of the collaboration is Margin Manager, Zitcha’s merchant intelligence layer, which feeds product-level margin insights into Pentaleap’s auction and ranking engine.
Pentaleap, in turn, governs how products are ranked and served by connecting multiple demand sources—including ad servers, demand-side platforms (DSPs), and major platforms such as Teads and Amazon Ads—to a unified decision-making framework.
The companies said the resulting model enables retailers to adopt a “best-of-breed” technology stack without overhauling their existing systems.
Designed to be ad-stack agnostic and privacy compliant, the solution operates within retailers’ own data environments and can integrate with existing search, personalisation, campaign management, and demand partner systems.
Rather than requiring retailers to replace current infrastructure, the combined offering is intended to improve existing capabilities incrementally.
“For too long, retail media networks have operated in isolation using digital advertising metrics that do not speak the language of the merchant,” said Troy Townsend, Co-Founder and CEO of Zitcha.
“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.”
Andreas Reiffen, Co-Founder and CEO of Pentaleap, added that the ranking process remains one of the most critical moments in the shopper journey.
“The ranking decision is the moment of truth. If organic and sponsored products are ranked by separate systems, neither can be optimised,” he said.
“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.”
As retail media networks mature and retailers seek stronger proof of commercial impact, the partnership reflects a growing industry shift towards balancing advertising performance with merchant outcomes.
