In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, Kevel CEO James Avery sits down with Sam Wright, former head of retail media at Klarna, to discuss the practical realities of launching and scaling a retail media network—from org structure and trade dollars to what brands actually want.
Building a retail media network isn’t reserved for giants generating billions in revenue. Companies ranging from low millions to hundreds of billions are successfully launching advertising businesses. But success requires more than traffic and inventory alone.
In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, James speaks with Sam Wright, who now leads strategy at Kevel after spending years building Klarna Media from the ground up. Wright’s journey—from UK marketeer to global retail media lead—offers a practical blueprint for retailers and fintechs entering the retail media space. Here are the five biggest takeaways from their discussion.
Wright didn’t join Klarna with the intention of building a retail media network. When he joined in 2016, his focus was recruiting merchants into the UK network and refining Klarna’s payment products. As part of that effort, the team offered marketing support as a value-added service, helping merchants grow while Klarna expanded its network.
The inflection point came when merchants started asking for more.
“We were essentially giving away a lot of marketing,” Wright explained. “Then the scales of the balance of power—or the network effects—started to come into play, where we could then say to merchants, ‘I think you need to pay for this now.’”
That organic demand—brands proactively asking how to deploy more budget on your platform—is a key signal of readiness. If merchants aren’t already knocking on your door, manufacturing demand from scratch becomes significantly harder. Strong retail media programs start with a strong core business and an audience brands genuinely want to reach.
One of the most common, and costly, mistakes retailers make when launching retail media is underestimating the importance of executive alignment on customer experience.
As Wright put it, “It goes back to having really strong, C-level and down alignment.” Retail media can’t succeed as a side project or siloed revenue initiative. Leadership needs to be aligned not only on why retail media matters, but on what it should look like in practice.
“You need to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve as a retail media business,” Wright explained. “Not just from the fact that you want to enable that, but also down to the detail of how the things are gonna look.”
That level of specificity matters because every senior leader ultimately cares about the customer. “I’ve not met a C-level leader who doesn’t care about the customer experience to some degree,” Wright said. “From the chief product officer to the CEO to the commercial officer, they care about what customers are going to see—right down to the ad format or how relevant an ad is.”
When that alignment isn’t established early, friction shows up downstream. Product teams and retail media teams end up battling over placements, formats, and priorities—often after months of development work. Wright warned against long delivery cycles without leadership input: “Rather than having these big elongated periods of working and delivering, something gets delivered that isn’t quite what’s expected by the senior leadership team.”
His advice is simple but often overlooked: maintain consistent leadership check-ins. “Keep having those check-in points back with leadership to make sure that everybody’s on the journey,” he advised. Doing so “smooths things out and makes things go a lot faster” once teams start building.
Strong executive sponsorship also plays a critical role—especially early on. “If you’ve got a really strong sponsor…someone who can advocate for the teams at the lower levels, that’s really key,” Wright noted. Once revenue starts flowing, alignment tends to follow. But without it upfront, retail media programs risk slowing down, or stalling out, before they ever scale.
Retailers face a key decision when building a retail media network: how to structure the organization. While there is no single ‘correct’ model, Wright outlined two common models—of which there are clear tradeoffs.
“One [model] is when you want as much agency as possible—you want to enable as much autonomy as possible.” he explained. This approach typically means carving retail media into a standalone unit with its own sales, ad ops, product, and tech teams.
The upside to this is speed. “You can run really fast,” Wright said—but that autonomy often comes at a cost. Separate teams can create overlapping or conflicting commercial conversations with the same brand.
The downside is the potential for duplicated commercial conversations. For instance, a brand, Coca-Cola in Wright’s example, may hear from one team about product and fulfillment, and another about advertising—often without coordination.
Klarna took a more integrated approach. “We adopted the second model…try to keep the commercial relationship in one place,” Wright explained. That structure moves more slowly, but it preserves a unified view of the customer. “You have one view commercially with a customer…payments, GMV, advertising—and you get that single view of how important a customer is to your business.”
Neither model is inherently better. The right choice depends on how your organization sells today and how critical unified customer relationships are to long-term growth. As Wright made clear, org design should follow commercial reality—not just the desire to move fast.
Trade dollars aren’t disappearing—but how they’re allocated is changing. Wright was candid about the pace of that shift: “Whatever the change is coming, it’s gonna take a very long time. But I do think that more and more revenue will get moved into a more measurable state.”
Historically, joint business plans often involved large commitments with little accountability. “It’s a multimillion-dollar contract and we don’t mind where you spend it—you just need to spend it on marketing us,” Wright said. Retail media introduces a different expectation: performance, attribution, and transparency.
As retailers build measurable ad channels, Wright expects brands to demand more precision. “When it comes to the performance element of their plan, people are going to want to see more granularity around how that money’s being spent and the performance that they get for those investments over time.” The budgets may come from the same place—but accountability changes how that money is valued.
When it comes to what brands want from retail media networks, Wright sees two distinct, and equally important, audiences. Some advertisers want simplicity. “How can I press a button and go inside your retail media network and you just deliver me the best results?” he said, describing brands that prioritize ease of use and low operational effort.
Others want the opposite. “I want to dig right into the targeting…how do I really get the best performance and find those new customers?” Wright explained. These advertisers—often agencies or sophisticated in-house teams—expect configurability, self-serve tools, and deep control over optimization.
What unites both groups is a focus on incrementality. Brands don’t want to pay for sales that would have happened anyway—they want net-new customers and measurable lift. Retailers must decide which audience they’re building for first, or invest in platforms flexible enough to serve both without compromising performance.
Across every stage of the conversation, Wright returned to a consistent theme: retail media success is built on fundamentals, not flash. You don’t need to copy Amazon or launch every ad format at once. “You don’t need to be a behemoth of a business in order to offer a retail media network,” he said. What you do need is a strong core business and meaningful relationships with merchants who want to grow.
That means waiting for organic demand, aligning leadership early, choosing an org structure that reflects how you sell today, and focusing on delivery before complexity. As Wright noted, maturity isn’t one-dimensional. “You can be on a fairly simple setup and still be doing really well on the revenue side.”
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 Sam Wright here.
