Jan 13, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
James Avery is joined by Sam Wright, Kevel’s strategic advisor, to discuss the essential steps for launching and maturing a retail media business. Drawing from his experience globalizing Klarna Media…
I think one of the things that comes up a lot early on in building a retail media network or commerce media network, but I think never goes away, is the tension between the kind of site usability folks, user experience, the kind of the key product people, right? The people who are responsible for that e-commerce site or that FinTech site.
and you're messing with their stuff, right? You're like, we need to put an ad here.
How do you think about that kind of tension and what are some best practices for people running their retail media network to kind of work best with the other side of the business that kind of keep the core product side of the business?
We were very distributed and we had this sort of, you know, it was a larger business.
But also, I've seen that some of our customers that we work across as well, and even more magnified in some cases where things are, you know, very distributed.
But like, it goes back to having really strong, I think, sea level and down alignment, like need to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve as a retail media business you need to all be aligned on the fact that like retail media is going to be a revenue line for you and that you know this is the vision for delivering that and not just in my experience not just from the fact that you want to enable that but also down to the detail of how the things are going to look because when it gets to uh you know typically like a senior leadership team everybody really cares about the customer in most cases like i've not met a c-level leader who doesn't care about the customer experience to some degree like in varying sort of balances but you know so from everybody from the chief product officer to the obviously the ceo to the commercial officer care about like what their customers are going to see right down to the ad format or how relevant an ad is so i think everybody needs to be aligned around like what's going to be delivered That makes things a lot easier when you start to, you know, go lower down into the organization to the people who are actually building, you know, the things from the alignment and also the like the priority of, you know, some of these things in the organization.
i think it's super important to you know create the ideas have the agency to kind of to build out the different formats to build out like how you're gonna go to market and the pricing and everything else do that within the sort of the lower levels of the organization but keep having those check-in points back with leadership to make sure that like everybody's on the journey i think that smooths things out a lot and makes things go a lot faster um rather than kind of having these big elongated periods of like hey we're working we're working we're working But then, you know, something that gets delivered isn't quite sort of what's expected by maybe the senior leadership team.
So I think it's super important for me to have that kind of C-level alignment, you know, all the way through a project like that.
And I think a lot of times these pushes into retail media are coming down from a board level and C level.
So there's usually a sponsor at a high level, but then there's still going to be fights between the product managers
You know, if you've got a a really strong sponsor as well, and somebody who can advocate for the teams at the lower levels to support you there.
I think that's really key to have, like you say, that kind of champion within the organization for that line, especially if it's a new line of business, right? I think once you get going and you start to see the dollars or the pounds flowing in, then it becomes a bit more of a no-brainer and it's a good idea to everybody, right?
I think one of the things that comes up a lot early on in building a retail media network or commerce media network, but I think never goes away, is the tension between the kind of site usability folks, user experience, the kind of the key product people, right? The people who are responsible for that e-commerce site or that FinTech site.
and you're messing with their stuff, right? You're like, we need to put an ad here.
How do you think about that kind of tension and what are some best practices for people running their retail media network to kind of work best with the other side of the business that kind of keep the core product side of the business?
We were very distributed and we had this sort of, you know, it was a larger business.
But also, I've seen that some of our customers that we work across as well, and even more magnified in some cases where things are, you know, very distributed.
But like, it goes back to having really strong, I think, sea level and down alignment, like need to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve as a retail media business you need to all be aligned on the fact that like retail media is going to be a revenue line for you and that you know this is the vision for delivering that and not just in my experience not just from the fact that you want to enable that but also down to the detail of how the things are going to look because when it gets to uh you know typically like a senior leadership team everybody really cares about the customer in most cases like i've not met a c-level leader who doesn't care about the customer experience to some degree like in varying sort of balances but you know so from everybody from the chief product officer to the obviously the ceo to the commercial officer care about like what their customers are going to see right down to the ad format or how relevant an ad is so i think everybody needs to be aligned around like what's going to be delivered That makes things a lot easier when you start to, you know, go lower down into the organization to the people who are actually building, you know, the things from the alignment and also the like the priority of, you know, some of these things in the organization.
i think it's super important to you know create the ideas have the agency to kind of to build out the different formats to build out like how you're gonna go to market and the pricing and everything else do that within the sort of the lower levels of the organization but keep having those check-in points back with leadership to make sure that like everybody's on the journey i think that smooths things out a lot and makes things go a lot faster um rather than kind of having these big elongated periods of like hey we're working we're working we're working But then, you know, something that gets delivered isn't quite sort of what's expected by maybe the senior leadership team.
So I think it's super important for me to have that kind of C-level alignment, you know, all the way through a project like that.
And I think a lot of times these pushes into retail media are coming down from a board level and C level.
So there's usually a sponsor at a high level, but then there's still going to be fights between the product managers
You know, if you've got a a really strong sponsor as well, and somebody who can advocate for the teams at the lower levels to support you there.
I think that's really key to have, like you say, that kind of champion within the organization for that line, especially if it's a new line of business, right? I think once you get going and you start to see the dollars or the pounds flowing in, then it becomes a bit more of a no-brainer and it's a good idea to everybody, right?
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