Kepler has named holding company agency veteran Heather Dawson vice president, strategy & activation, retail media. The role is new. 

Dawson joins the agency amid a surge in its commerce & retail practice, which has grown nearly 30% this year versus the prior year period. Retail practice clients include Hasbro, SharkNinja and La Colombe. 

Dawson previously served as senior vice president-global commerce solutions at Kinesso, the performance marketing agency created by IPG a few years ago that is now part of Omnicom. 

Earlier she was head of commerce at PHD and before that spent more than a dozen years at WPP’s Mindshare, lastly as ecommerce global lead.