CART Index AI launches to help brands optimise retail media creative and boost campaign ROI

Gary Head Launches CART Index AI to Improve Retail Media Creative

Gary Head, former General Manager of Omnichannel at Mars United Commerce ANZ, has introduced CART Index AI, a platform that helps brands, agencies, and retailers test and optimise retail media creative before campaigns go live. This tool addresses a critical gap in retail media strategy by focusing on creative effectiveness, a factor that can represent up to 70% of campaign performance.

Despite its importance, fewer than half of marketers test creative assets, and testing is particularly rare in retail media. With retail media spend in Australia expected to reach $2.6 to $3 billion by 2026–27, neglecting creative testing leads to missed opportunities and wasted budgets.

How CART Index AI Works

CART Index AI uses artificial intelligence to provide quick diagnostics on creative assets. It delivers a score out of 100 along with shopper heatmaps and actionable recommendations. This enables creative teams to understand how well their work attracts attention, conveys the message, supports brand recognition, and triggers shopper action.

Built on years of shopper behaviour research and eye-tracking data, CART Index evaluates creative across four key dimensions:

• Attention attraction
• Message clarity
• Brand recognition
• Trigger power

The platform offers insights within minutes, a significant improvement over traditional pre-testing methods that are often slow and costly.

Feedback from Industry Users

Sanitarium, known for brands like Weet-Bix, UP&GO, and So Good, is an early adopter of CART Index AI. They use it to test campaigns across Australia and New Zealand. Agencies such as Connecting Plots have also integrated the platform into their creative review processes.

Dave Jansen, Executive Creative Director at Connecting Plots, explains: "Retail media isn’t just another ad channel; it’s one of the few places where attention is truly captive. When the creativity hits the mark, it influences shopper behaviour right at the shelf. CART Index finally gives us a shared language between creative and media."

Helen Vacher, Senior Shopper Marketing Manager at Sanitarium, adds: "Having CART Index as a third-party validation tool removes subjectivity from creative decisions and gives us a clear rationale to defend and optimise our shopper-centric executions."

About CART Index

CART Index is an Australian AI platform focused on testing and optimising retail media creative. It provides instant diagnostic scores, heatmaps, and AI-driven recommendations based on shopper research, marketing effectiveness studies, and visual attention modelling.

For creatives aiming to sharpen their retail media campaigns and ensure their work performs effectively on shelf, tools like CART Index AI offer practical, data-driven insights that can improve ROI and reduce guesswork.