Darkroom Names Nick Menicucci Managing Director, Marketplaces and Retail Media
NEW YORK – October 16, 2026 – Darkroom, the AI-native growth marketing agency, has named Nick Menicucci Managing Director, Marketplaces and Retail Media. Nick, the 2024 Skai Champion of the Year, will scale Darkroom’s marketplaces and retail media services into one commerce media division as consumer brands move more of their ad budgets to the retailers where shoppers buy.
From building an Amazon channel to running commerce media at scale
Nick joins Darkroom from eAccountable, where he rose from Director of Amazon to Vice President of Marketplaces and built out the agency’s Amazon and marketplace channels from scratch. His work there centered on helping brands grow profitably on Amazon and other marketplaces, using a data-driven approach to drive real results.
In 2024, Skai named him Skai Champion of the Year at its ShopAble Media Awards. The award recognized how he made the commerce media platform central to his team’s campaign management, optimization, reporting, and strategy.
In 2025, Nick joined Amazon’s Partner Advisory Council, helping shape how brands pair paid media with Amazon’s logistics.
His mandate at Darkroom
Nick started at Darkroom on September 21 and works alongside SVP of Strategy J. William Margaritis. He leads a department that combines Amazon marketplace management with retail media management across Walmart, Target, Instacart, Criteo, and delivery platforms such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and GoPuff.
His priorities:
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Unify the offer: one commerce plan that connects paid and organic performance across marketplaces, retailer networks, and in-store sales.
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Scale the systems: account management frameworks and automated client KPI dashboards that keep reporting consistent as the client roster grows.
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Build it into the product: bring the department’s best workflows into Shadow, Darkroom’s AI commerce layer, so strategists spend less time on reporting and more on growth.
The appointment follows Darkroom’s recent senior hires, including Julie Novak to lead Social Commerce and TikTok Shop.
From left to right: Ryan Smith, Jackson Corey, Lucas DiPietrantonio and Nick Menicucci, part of Darkroom’s executive leadership
Why retail media, why now
eMarketer expects US retail media ad spending to near $70 billion in 2026 (source). That spend is spread across a growing list of retailer networks, each with its own buying tools, data, and reporting. Brands that run every network on its own end up with fragmented budgets and results they cannot compare.
Darkroom bets that the winners in this market will manage marketplaces and retail media as one program, judged by incremental sales and profit. Nick’s job is to make that the default for every Darkroom client.
“Retail media has become the second search engine for consumer brands, and most of them still buy it one retailer at a time,” said Lucas DiPietrantonio, Co-Founder and CEO of Darkroom. “Bringing Nick in as Managing Director of Marketplaces and Retail Media gives our clients an operator who has turned Amazon into a profit line for brands. Paired with Shadow, his team can run Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart as one business.”
“Retail media has a fragmentation problem,” said Nick. “Every retailer sells ads with its own data, its own tools and its own definition of success. My job at Darkroom is to give brands one plan and one scoreboard across every marketplace they sell on, measured by the profit each dollar adds to the business.”
About Darkroom
Darkroom is a technology-driven commerce acceleration agency and growth marketing agency for marketplaces, social shopping platforms, and direct-to-consumer brands. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York, Darkroom combines elite marketing and creative talent with a unified AI workspace that integrates modern AI models with client data.
The result is an AI-native approach to omnichannel execution, combining paid media, Amazon marketplace management, TikTok Shop, retention marketing, and performance creative, designed to reduce friction and help teams move faster across the channels that matter most for consumer businesses. Darkroom has generated over $5 billion in attributable revenue for its client portfolio, including work with brands like Airbnb, Amazon, and Everlane. Learn more at darkroomagency.com.
Media Contact
Company Name: Darkroom
Contact Person: Miguel Almeida, VP, Marketing
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City: New York
Country: United States
Website: darkroomagency.com
