Building a retail media network requires more than ad serving infrastructure. It requires a deep, real-time understanding of who your shoppers are and what they intend to buy. In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, Avery speaks with Paulo Cunha, whose company Shift Forward was acquired by Kevel to power what is now Kevel Audience. Cunha's journey, from a consulting startup in Porto, Portugal, to building the first-party data infrastructure behind some of Europe's most sophisticated retail media programs, reveals just how much the industry has matured, and how much further it still has to go.
Here are the five biggest takeaways from their conversation.
Takeaway #1: Retailers Wanted to Own Their Data Long Before Retail Media Had a Name
"It was really the way for them to secure their future, their business future, their data."— Paulo Cunha
Cunha founded Shift Forward in 2011, driven by a clear observation: retailers and marketplaces wanted to own their technology. Not for technology's sake, but because data ownership was becoming a strategic necessity. This was years before GDPR came into full force, but the direction was already visible.
Early on, Shift Forward consulted with European publishers and agencies, helping them map out foundational advertising technologies including event tracking, user segmentation, and the core infrastructure that would later underpin retail media. The realization that 90% of clients needed the same core technology led to a product pivot: instead of selling the full foundational stack, Cunha's team focused on specific use cases, particularly first-party data management.
"Everyone was doing data sharing, third party DMPs, and very little sophistication when it comes to their own ownership of technology," Cunha recalled. That gap became the business.
Takeaway #2: Real-Time Segmentation Is the Capability Most Retailers Are Still Missing
Many retailers today have customer data sitting in data warehouses. The problem isn't the data. It's the latency.
Avery illustrated the issue directly: "If I go to Walmart and search for a 70-inch TV, then get distracted and click on another tab, how quickly does Walmart start targeting me as somebody who was looking to buy a 70-inch TV? With a lot of people's current infrastructure, it could be days, at minimum hours."
Cunha put the stakes plainly: "The opportunity for the ad to be exposed is in the first few seconds or minutes of that journey." If a retailer is still relying on marketing-oriented data flows built for email campaigns, where a few hours of lag doesn't matter, that infrastructure will fail them entirely in a retail media context.
The distinction matters because retail media is a fundamentally different use case. A consumer's journey on a retailer's site or app may last only 30 minutes. Segment them too slowly, and the moment has passed. Segment them in real time, and the result is higher CPMs, more sellable inventory, and a better consumer experience, because the "ad" is really just the right product at the right moment.
"You're gonna get much higher yield simply because you're able to segment earlier in the journey," Cunha said. "That wasn't true before."
Takeaway #3: European Retailers Are Often More Advanced, Because They Have to Be
Scale shapes strategy. A medium-sized player in the U.S. is likely larger than some of the biggest retailers in Europe. That size difference forces European retailers to approach retail media differently.
"In order to get the same sort of impact, you just have to be perhaps a little bit more adventurous," Cunha explained. Where U.S. retailers can achieve meaningful results through small optimizations at massive scale, European retailers often have to pursue more sophisticated strategies from the start. Yield management, AI-driven ad selection, and aggressive optimization of every impression.
Market fragmentation also plays a role. European holdcos often own retail chains across multiple countries, multiple verticals, and multiple languages, a structure that has no real equivalent in the U.S. "You may have a holding group that, in their original country, is very innovative. But then the satellite countries where they also operate, they're not as sophisticated," Cunha noted.
The result is a dynamic where innovation often emerges from smaller, more constrained markets and where direct sales models dominate because programmatic simply doesn't have the scale to work.
Takeaway #4: GDPR Isn't a Constraint. It's a Filter for the Right Technology Partners
Privacy regulation reshaped how European retailers evaluate technology vendors. For Kevel, that turned out to be an advantage.
"If anyone starts to talk to me about GDPR, we know we're on the right path," Cunha said. "If you're concerned about privacy, we all of a sudden have a very good chance of being a good fit."
Kevel's architecture, where retailers remain the data controller and first-party data is never shared by default, aligns naturally with GDPR requirements. Audience models are trained per customer, with no data leakage between accounts. That's not a compliance workaround; it's how the system was designed from the beginning.
Importantly, Cunha sees this mindset spreading. Even in the U.S., where legislation is less prescriptive, brands are increasingly demanding privacy-first practices. "They do not want their data to be misused, even if certain things are more flexible in the U.S. Because of GDPR, they are influenced to not want those practices." Retailers evaluating technology partners in any market are increasingly asking the same questions European retailers have been asking for years.
Takeaway #5: Cultural Fit Is the Most Undervalued Factor in Any Acquisition
Numbers close deals. Culture determines whether they work.
Cunha was direct about this: "The cultural fit is the most misvalued part of the equation. I think everyone goes for the number. But if it is not sustainable in the future, you are not gonna be happy doing that. Your team's not gonna be happy doing that."
Shift Forward and Adzerk (now Kevel) had aligned on culture long before the acquisition was formally discussed. Cunha's team had actually adapted Adzerk's internal code of conduct, their values around trust, autonomy, and treating people as adults, for their own company years earlier. "We stole the original Adzerk code of conduct," Cunha admitted with a laugh. "We thought, why try to do this differently?"
That alignment paid off in retention. Four to five years post-acquisition, Kevel has lost just one person from the Shift Forward team. The Porto office has grown from roughly 12 to 14 people at the time of acquisition to more than 35 today, becoming Kevel's primary engineering hub. Avery credited both the cultural foundation and Cunha's team-building: "Being able to retain effectively 100% of the people has been awesome."
For founders weighing acquisition offers, Cunha's advice was clear: "Don't sell to the first highest bidder. Think about whether this is sustainable in the future. Because if it's not, no matter how much was put on the table, you're not going to have full potential because you're going to be leaving sooner rather than later."
The Future of Retail Media Is Built on What You Own
Cunha's journey, from first-party data consulting in Porto to building the audience infrastructure behind Kevel's Retail Media Cloud, reflects a broader truth about where retail media is heading. The retailers who will succeed are those who treat their data, their technology, and their customer relationships as assets to own and protect, not outsource.
Real-time segmentation, privacy-first architecture, and cultural continuity through acquisitions are not peripheral concerns. They are central to whether a retail media program can scale, differentiate, and deliver results that advertisers can't find elsewhere. European retailers have been grappling with these constraints for years and, in many cases, their programs are more sophisticated because of it.
For any retailer or marketplace evaluating where to invest next, the questions Cunha and Avery surface are worth sitting with: How quickly can you act on a shopper's behavior? Are you actually in control of your data? And if you're building through partnerships or acquisitions, are the people and values you're bringing in ones you'd want to keep for the next five years?
Listen to the Full Conversation on Unlocking Retail Media
For more insights like these, tune in to the full episode of Unlocking Retail Media, the podcast where Kevel CEO James Avery sits down with industry leaders and innovators shaping the future of retail advertising.
Listen to this episode with Paulo Cunha here.
