Gary Head, former General Manager of Omnichannel at Mars United Commerce ANZ, has launched CART Index AI, a new platform aimed at improving creative effectiveness in retail media.
The tool is designed to help brands, agencies and retailers test and optimise creative before it hits the shelf, addressing a long-standing gap in retail media strategy. According to Analytic Partners, creative accounts for up to 70 per cent of campaign performance, yet fewer than half of marketers test creative, and testing is rare in retail media specifically.
With retail media spend in Australia forecast to reach $2.6 to $3 billion by 2026–27, the blind spot is costly. CART Index aims to close that gap by providing rapid AI-powered diagnostics, including a score out of 100, shopper heatmaps, and actionable recommendations.
“Time and again, I’d see two campaigns with similar products and media plans deliver vastly different ROI,” said Head. “The missing variable was creative. CART Index helps fix that.”
Built on decades of shopper behaviour research and eye-tracking data, the platform evaluates assets across four dimensions: attention attraction, message clarity, brand recognition and trigger power. Users receive detailed insights within minutes, contrasting with traditional pre-testing methods that can be slow and expensive.
Early adopters include Sanitarium, maker of Weet-Bix, UP&GO and So Good, which is using the platform to test campaigns across Australia and New Zealand. Agencies like Connecting Plots have also integrated CART Index into their creative review workflows.
““Retail media isn’t just another ad channel, it’s one of the few places left where attention is captive.” said Dave Jansen, Executive Creative Director at Connecting Plots. “When the creativity’s good? It doesn’t just ‘show up on shelf. ’It changes behaviour at the shelf. That’s the power of CART Index. We’ve finally got a shared language between creative and media,”
Helen Vacher, Senior Shopper Marketing Manager at Sanitarium, added: “Having CART Index as a third-party validation tool takes the subjectivity out of creative and provides a clear rationale to defend and optimise our shopper centric execution.”
About CART Index
CART Index is an Australian-based AI platform that helps test and optimise retail media creative. It provides instant diagnostic scores, heatmaps, and AI-generated recommendations. The tool is built on shopper research, marketing effectiveness studies and visual attention modelling.