Canadian indie Salt XC expands its U.S. presence with purchase of Craft & Commerce
By Michael Bürgi • February 11, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
There may be trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada thanks to on-again off-again tariff threats, but that’s not stopping a Canadian-based independent shop from gaining a stronger foothold in the U.S. market as it expands its North American reach.
Digiday has learned that independently owned experiential and retail media specialist agency Salt XC, based out of Toronto, has just made its second purchase in a year in the U.S., buying Craft & Commerce, a full-service media agency with bases in New York, Chicago and Florida. Terms of the acquisition were not shared.
Although Salt XC already has operated in the U.S., the goal with this purchase was to expand its regional reach as well as its full-service media offerings, explained Jil Lohnes, president of connected services at Salt. Intersecting the worlds of experiences and media, to her thinking, reflects where the world of marketing is going today.
“Being able to have a stronger, more integrated service in the media side was really important to us,” said Lohnes. “And being able to have a stronger footprint in the U.S. was also really important to us — it’s kind of like the missing piece of the puzzle from our standpoint.”
Clients of both agencies, which include Kraft-Heinz, AB InBev, Adidas and Chobani among the better known, have been informed of the marriage, said Jordan Ruden, one of Craft & Commerce’s partners along with Carli Feinstein and Mark Barker. For now, the agency will continue to operate under its own name.
“When [C&C’s clients] look at the offerings that the Salt team brings — not only the people and culture, which is super aligned with us — the tech and the scale that we’re going to be able to add on to the offerings of Craft & Commerce, they felt really good about it,” said Ruden. “Especially around AI, the other tech, and even the events and activations that they saw as real value.”
The AI part of why Ruden is excited for the union comes from Salt’s acquisition last year of Nectar First, an AI-driven media and marketing agency that’s helped to inject Salt with AI chops it would have taken a long time to develop.
Jordan Bortolotti, who founded Nectar First and is president of Salt Media, part of Salt XC, brings a lot of that AI expertise to the company. “When you think about our services, it’s everything from figuring out the nitty gritty of how to use AI and automated trafficking to get content live faster to reimagining what a brand experience looks like between the physical world the digital world, AI, content and everything in between,” he told Digiday.
To Lohnes’ thinking, it’s the expansion of the “experience” that makes the group worth its proverbial Salt with new clients. “When we talk about experiences, it goes beyond just physical experience,” she explained. “Whether that’s a piece of content, or with a brand on social media, or a creator representing a brand. For us, if you separate the experience from the media, you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table to really break through and be relevant to the consumers.”
That’s exactly why independent analyst Andrew Lipsman, who consults under the Media, Ads & Commerce name, thinks the move to acquire C&C was smart — the retail media expertise that C&C brings to the table will also add an element to Salt’s experiential prowess that marketers need today, in order to make retail media work more effectively.
“It’s a real natural fit, because these are two agencies that are forward thinking and aligned with where a lot of media is going, and in particular retail media,” said Lipsman. “They’ve developed core competencies in that space that I’m not sure the holdcos have quite figured out yet. Salt is all about experiential activation, and I think that’s a really promising part of the broader in-store retail media landscape, while Craft and Commerce has been at the cutting edge of in-store digital.”
