Equativ and Valiuz have added live-priced product carousels to Equativ's Maestro platform for retail media campaigns that run beyond retailers' own websites, according to a French-language announcement Equativ published on its website on September 8, 2026. A five-week pilot for Groupe SEB's Cookeo range put 75% of the resulting revenue in physical stores, according to the two companies, although the announcement gives two different accounts of the campaign's return on ad spend.

In Short

Two French advertising companies, Equativ and Valiuz, built online ads that show real products with their current price and stock level, and tried them out for Moulinex kitchen appliances in May and June 2026. This matters to brands and retailers because the test tried to connect those ads to actual purchases, and most of the purchases it counted happened in physical shops rather than on websites. Advertisers buying through Equativ's Maestro platform can now run these product carousels using Valiuz shopper data. One part of the announcement says the campaign returned close to three euros of sales for every euro spent, while the detailed results only call the return positive, and neither explains how the sales were counted.

What changed in Maestro

Equativ, the Paris-based independent ad tech company formerly known as Smart AdServer, and Valiuz, the retail data alliance whose partners include Auchan, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon, are now selling a joint retail media offer built on Maestro by Equativ. According to Equativ, the offer adds three sets of functions to the platform, each designed for audience extension campaigns: real-time catalogue management, covering product prices and stock levels; return on ad spend (ROAS) measurement; and native retail media formats grouped under the Shoppable Ads name.

Audience extension is the part of retail media that runs outside a retailer's own properties. IAB Europe's March 2025 definitions describe offsite retail media as retailer data applied to inventory beyond the retailer's owned websites and apps, across display, video, social, connected TV, audio and email. That is where Groupe SEB had already been spending with Valiuz before this test.

The announcement was published in French only. Quotations in this article are PPC Land translations.

The rationale the companies give is a familiar one. Media budgets are under growing pressure and advertisers expect measurable results, according to Equativ, and the stated goal is to turn the depth of shopper data into concrete sales that satisfy brands' return-on-investment demands.

Deployed through Maestro, the Shoppable Ads format is an interactive unit built around a dynamic carousel. It displays an advertiser's flagship products with prices adjusted in real time and according to available stock, and it places the most relevant product references first. The companies liken the result to an online shop window.

Everything depends on the retailer's product catalogue. According to Equativ, the platform ingests the e-merchant's catalogue feeds directly and then automatically adapts and optimises the ad creative to match whichever products the advertiser is promoting. Valiuz supplies the activation of transactional data; Equativ supplies the retail media technology that serves and renders the ads.

Several technical points go unaddressed. The announcement does not say how often catalogue feeds refresh or what "real time" means in operational terms. Nor does it explain whether an out-of-stock item is removed from a carousel or simply moved down the order, what signal determines which references count as "most relevant", or which inventory types carry the format. The retailer whose catalogue fed the Cookeo carousels is not named. Pricing, availability outside France and any connected TV version were not disclosed.

The companies frame the benefits by audience. Consumers are promised a more useful ad experience with relevant products, current prices and stock taken into account. Advertisers are offered shopper data activated at scale, real-time product optimisation and precise ROAS measurement. Retailers, in turn, would get more value from their shopper audiences, smarter catalogue management and a stronger ability to show the business impact of campaigns.

The Cookeo pilot

The first test ran with Groupe SEB and its Moulinex brand, which the release calls a long-standing Valiuz partner. Until then, according to the two companies, Groupe SEB had used Valiuz shopper data segments in audience extension campaigns served on standard IAB formats. Those activations helped build brand awareness, the release says, but both partners wanted to go further and demonstrate the incremental value of shopper data.

So the objective had two parts: deliver a more engaging ad experience, and show that shopper data accelerates performance when it is paired with a suitable creative format.

The campaign ran from May 4 to June 7, 2026, and promoted Moulinex's Cookeo multicooker range. It targeted audiences showing purchase intent in cooking and small household appliances, built from Valiuz shopper data profiles.

The results, as the companies present them, cover four measures. ROAS was positive. Clicks per impression ran two and a half times higher than in Groupe SEB's first-quarter campaign. Stores accounted for 75% of the revenue, which the companies describe as a strong effect on shop sales. And the campaign reached 410,000 unique people "in a single month".

Julia Lemaire, media project manager at Groupe SEB, described the campaign as a turning point for the company's approach to the channel. "This Cookeo campaign marks a new stage in our approach to retail media by demonstrating the ability of our media campaigns to generate performance and measurable business results," she said. "The results of this first campaign are particularly encouraging and demonstrate the power of shopper data combined with more engaging, conversion-oriented formats. It is an important development for Groupe SEB, allowing us to make our media investments ever more useful, measurable and value-creating levers, serving both our brands and our consumers."

Two versions of the return

Which headline figure a reader takes away depends on which part of the announcement they read. The summary at the top of Equativ's press page states that the first campaign with Valiuz and Groupe SEB shows a ROAS "close to x3". The results section, which sets out the campaign metrics in detail, describes the ROAS only as "positive". No numerical ROAS appears anywhere in the body of the release.

Neither passage explains the calculation. There is no attribution window, no statement on whether revenue combines online and store sales, no list of which retailers' transaction data was matched, and no indication of whether the denominator is media cost alone or total campaign cost. A ROAS close to 3 would mean roughly three euros of attributed sales for each euro of media. Read strictly, "positive" could describe any return above zero, although in marketing usage the word usually implies revenue exceeding spend.

The click comparison has a gap of its own. The baseline is "the Q1 campaign", whose CTR is not disclosed. The release indicates that Groupe SEB's earlier Valiuz campaigns ran on standard IAB formats, yet it does not state outright that the first-quarter campaign did, nor whether that flight promoted the same range, targeted the same audiences or ran on the same inventory. Any comparison between a January-to-March flight and a May-to-June flight also mixes seasonal effects with format effects.

The reach number raises a smaller question. The 410,000 unique people are described as reached in a single month, while the campaign dates in the same document span 35 days. Whether the figure covers the full flight or one calendar month within it is not stated.

There is also a gap between the test's stated purpose and what it reports. The partners set out to demonstrate the incremental value of shopper data, but the release describes no control group or holdout, which is what incrementalitymeasurement requires. The IAB's commerce media measurement framework, published on November 3, 2025, draws that line explicitly: it defines incrementality as the causal effect of a campaign compared with what would have happened without it, and treats attribution and ROAS as records of outcomes rather than proof of causation. The framework asks for credible counterfactuals, controls for seasonality and competing factors, and statistical tests such as confidence intervals. As published, the Cookeo figures are attributed outcomes supplied by the vendors.

The document even carries two dates. Equativ's press page lists it as published on September 8, 2026, while the release text opens with the dateline "Paris, 9 septembre 2026".

Why the store share matters

Of the published figures, the store share may carry the most weight for how retail media budgets get judged. According to the companies, 75% of the campaign's revenue was realised in-store rather than online.

That direction matches independent research, even if the proportion is higher. An analysis by Incremental of 150,000 campaigns, representing $350 million in spend across four large retail media networks, found that 42% of the sales driven by off-site video happened in store, compared with 7% for on-site search. The same study found that siloed last-touch attribution understated the return on upper-funnel retail media by a factor of three to five in some cases. For a brand whose audience extension campaigns had been credited mainly with awareness, a measurement that captures till receipts changes what the channel appears to deliver.

Valiuz's structure makes such a link possible in principle. The alliance pools data from around 20 partner retailers, among them Leroy Merlin, Decathlon, Auchan, Kiabi and Boulanger, and says its omnichannel offer spans the whole purchase journey, from profiling to activation on-site, off-site, in-store and through CRM, as well as ad performance measurement. Which partners' sales data was used to connect Cookeo ad exposure to store purchases is not specified.

Bridging online and store measurement has become a competitive theme across the sector. Broadsign and Mirakl Ads presented an integration at Cannes Lions on June 24, 2026 intended to end the separate vendors, workflows and reports that brands use for e-commerce and store campaigns. Standard-setting began earlier: IAB and IAB Europe opened in-store retail media measurement standards for public comment in September 2024, covering footfall, engagement and sales lift.

A crowded French market

Valiuz, founded in 2019, describes itself as France's leading retail media sales house and one of the leaders in Europe. The release offers no metric behind that ranking. The company says it operates in France, Italy, Poland, Spain and Portugal, and that it intends to become Europe's leading data and retail media player. It also claims an unmatched customer database in France, calling it the largest and most diverse source of its kind, without supplying a figure.

"Advertisers are now looking for set-ups capable of reconciling brand impact, engagement and measurable business results," said Stéphane Fiocchi, commercial director at Valiuz. "With Shoppable Ads, we are demonstrating that it is possible to capture the full value of shopper data with a performance mindset, without giving up the quality of the ad experience. The first results obtained with our partners at Equativ for Groupe SEB perfectly illustrate this ambition to innovate."

French retail media has settled into a handful of blocs. When Carrefour and Coopérative U formed their Concordis alliance on July 8, 2025, the market divided along three axes: Carrefour, Coopérative U and Unlimitail, the joint venture between Publicis and Carrefour; a partnership linking Les Mousquetaires, Auchan and Valiuz; and E.Leclerc, which works independently with Criteo. As part of that realignment, Coopérative U was moving its retail media business from Criteo to Unlimitail.

Unlimitail has been working the same offsite territory. MediaMarktSaturn's first offsite retail media programme, built with Unlimitail, started in October 2025 in Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, with attribution across online and offline purchases. Criteo, meanwhile, has been absorbing client losses: its retail media revenue fell 21% to $47.9 million in the second quarter of 2026 after two large retail clients narrowed the scope of their work with the company.

Equativ's retail media build-out

For Equativ, the Valiuz offer is the latest step in a retail media push that started with an acquisition. The company bought Kamino Retail, an on-site retail media platform for retailers, in a deal made public on September 26, 2024 that brought 20 employees across. Elie Aboucaya, Kamino's co-founder, appears in the new release as Equativ's SVP retail media.

"This collaboration with Valiuz illustrates our desire to move retail media towards more interactive, more creative and more performance-oriented formats," Aboucaya said. "Thanks to our Maestro platform, brands and retailers can now activate their audiences with a much more impactful, simple and results-driven approach."

The platform was renamed next. In January 2025, Equativ renamed its platform Maestro by Equativ, presenting it as a programmatic curation tool that pre-qualifies impressions at the SSP level before bidding and connects to more than 500,000 publishers, apps and media channels. After Equativ completed its integration with Sharethrough on June 9, 2025, Maestro became the single platform for the combined company, spanning connected TV, video, native, display and retail media.

Shoppable formats were on the roadmap well before this announcement. When Equativ became the ad server and primary SSP for Titan OS in March 2025, the two companies planned shoppable ad formats combining retail data with ad technology for later that year. The Valiuz release makes no reference to television.

Maestro now also underpins a wider European project. The European Media Marketplace, formed by ten companies including Deutsche Telekom's T Advertising Solutions, Orange Advertising, Vinted and Vodafone and presented on July 7, 2026, runs on Maestro, with pilot campaigns planned for September 2026 in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Whether Valiuz audiences or the carousel format will be available inside that marketplace is not addressed.

One detail in Equativ's boilerplate stands out against its own history. The company now cites more than 720 professionals across 19 countries; when the Sharethrough integration closed in June 2025, the figure given was more than 750 across 20 countries. The release does not explain the difference.

Measurement pressure across Europe

The offer arrives as European buyers ask more of retail media reporting. IAB Europe's AdEx Benchmark put European retail media at €13.314 billion in 2025, up 16.7%, with the category passing 10% of total digital ad spend for the first time. Retail search made up €10.002 billion of that, growing 19.1%, while retail display grew 9.8% to €3.312 billion. Those totals exclude in-store retail media, which is precisely where the companies say most of the Cookeo revenue was realised.

What buyers want is well documented. An IAB Europe survey found that 88% of buyers want ROAS reporting but only 71% of retail media networks consistently provide it, with a lack of standardisation named by 53% as the biggest barrier to investment. The same research recorded a shift toward offsite placements: the share of buyers allocating more than 41% of spend to offsite rose from 30% to 46%.

Shoppable display units are not new in themselves. PayPal presented Storefront Ads in June 2025, turning display placements on publisher sites into shopping units driven by product-level data. More recently, KERV.ai extended its shoppable technology on LG televisions to France and the other EU5 markets in August 2026. The Equativ and Valiuz version pairs a French retail alliance's transaction data with live catalogue feeds and store-sales reporting inside one buying platform.

How far that reporting can be trusted will depend on details the partners have yet to publish. A single pilot with one brand, one product range and one quarter-on-quarter comparison is a starting point. The ROAS calculation, the matching method behind the store share and the identity of the retailers involved are the pieces of evidence that would let buyers compare it with anything else on the market.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Equativ, the Paris-based ad tech company behind the Maestro platform, and Valiuz, a retail data alliance of around 20 partner retailers including Auchan, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon. Groupe SEB and its Moulinex brand ran the pilot, with statements from Julia Lemaire of Groupe SEB, Stéphane Fiocchi of Valiuz and Elie Aboucaya of Equativ.

What: A joint retail media offer adding real-time catalogue management for prices and stock, ROAS measurement and interactive product carousels, sold as Shoppable Ads, to Maestro for audience extension campaigns. A Cookeo pilot reported a positive ROAS, a CTR two and a half times that of a first-quarter campaign, 75% of revenue in store and reach of 410,000 unique people, while the page summary claims a ROAS close to 3.

When: Equativ published the announcement on September 8, 2026, under a September 9 Paris dateline. The pilot ran from May 4 to June 7, 2026.

Where: France, where Valiuz's partner retailers operate and where the Cookeo campaign ran, with Valiuz also present in Italy, Poland, Spain and Portugal.

Why: The companies say advertisers want campaigns that combine brand impact with measurable sales and that retailers want more value from shopper data. The announcement matters to buyers because it ties offsite retail media to store sales, but it publishes no ROAS method, no baseline CTR and no incrementality test.