Building on the momentum of recent expansion into Australia with the appointment of Chris Woodworth, Kevel is continuing to grow its global leadership team. The company has appointed John Chaplin as Chief Product Officer. With a career spanning product design, engineering, and retail media, Chaplin brings a depth of experience that few in the industry can match, having previously served as CPO at CitrusAd and SVP at Epsilon Retail Media.
We sat down with John to hear what drew him to Kevel, what he sees as the most pressing gaps in retail media today, and where the industry is headed over the next few years.
What drew you to Kevel, and what excites you most about joining the company at this stage of its growth?
Kevel's API-first approach and its solid, customisable technology is an existing foundation to work from.
"Joining at a time when the company still has the soul of a startup, but is now at a scale that can really affect change and achieve its goals, is a rare opportunity."
Kevel has a great "can-do" culture with a team of passionate and driven people, and I hope I can contribute to their growth with my experience and background.
Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
I actually have a Director and Composer credit on IMDb. They were for a DVD produced on Ian Thorpe — the Australian Olympic swimmer. That one tends to surprise people.
You've helped build retail media products at CitrusAd and then Epsilon — what lessons from those experiences are you bringing to Kevel?
A few things stand out. First, listen to customers. Really listen, to understand what the real problem is and the drivers that require it to be fixed or changed. What is the business impact? How are other customers finding or solving for this? The end solution might be different than first conceived.
Second, prioritize. As much as we would like to do everything for our customers, we only have a finite team and engineering capacity. Before any work is committed, we need to establish its net benefit for both Kevel and our customers.
Third, fail fast and fail often. We rarely get perfection out of the box, so let's find out as fast and cheaply as we can. And finally, build small teams of product, design, and engineering working closely together, focused on a single outcome. This model is even more adaptable with the advent of generative and agentic AI tools.
How do you see AI shaping the future of retail media products?
Unlike conventional click and scroll behaviour, customer intent is 100% explicit in a conversational interface, not inferred. That changes everything about how ads are matched to moments.
AI allows advertisers and retail media platforms to put the right ad and content in front of the customer at the right time. We're at the start of seeing agentic commerce reshape ecommerce and retail media. Think about what it means for product catalogs and their hygiene, ad intent, and the roles of agentic customers versus agentic media planners, both onsite and offsite. The implications are significant.
How should retailers be thinking about activating their first-party data more effectively?
Start with the basics. Ensure you have a complete view of your customer. Align online and offline sales and implement a CDP. From there, use that data through personalization and dynamic creative optimization to deliver targeted and relevant ads.
Explore clean rooms where data can be shared with advertisers as a value add-on. Expand into audience extension on the open web and other publishers. And always ensure closed-loop reporting that showcases ROAS to demonstrate the platform's value. With privacy regulations tightening and third-party cookies largely deprecated, first-party data gives retailers a significant advantage in the advertising environment.
"Kevel has a great 'can-do' culture with a team of passionate and driven people, and I hope I can contribute to their growth with my experience and background."
How important is user experience and self-service capability in winning and retaining advertisers on a retail media network?
Critically important. Retailers with complicated ad tech and outdated interfaces relied heavily on managed services to run their retail media platforms. That approach was costly, not scalable, and didn't give advertisers the transparency, flexibility, and control they were seeking.
With simplified self-service interfaces, advertisers or their agencies can manage and optimize campaigns in real time. The advantages are meaningful on both sides. For advertisers and agencies: full control of their ad inventory, the ability to launch and pause autonomously, real-time reporting and optimization, no third-party involvement in the flight process, and access to all ad placements in one central location. For retailers: operational efficiency, scalability, and a lower barrier to entry for advertisers. Large retail media networks have set standards for what to expect from a platform, and advertisers have come to expect this. As automation and AI do more of the heavy lifting, these platforms will only get easier to manage.
What product innovations do you think will define the next two to three years in retail media?
AI and the ability to process large volumes of data will change the entire customer journey and advertising experience, from the retailer to the advertiser to the customer. Simplified campaign creation that delivers dynamic personalization and relevancy will become the baseline expectation.
Specifically, better product relevancy, faster campaign creation, and smarter keyword matching will be defining areas. The retailers and platforms that invest in these capabilities now will be well positioned as the industry matures.
How do you balance building flexible, API-driven infrastructure with the need for out-of-the-box simplicity for customers?
As the saying goes, we need to eat our own dog food. Our interfaces need to be the best examples of using this infrastructure. Abstract templates for common scenarios while still providing flexibility and preference setting at a deeper level. All features are not the same, and understanding customers' immediate needs to set up and get underway are different from finer settings that come later.
What advice would you give to retailers who are just starting their retail media journey and thinking about their technology stack?
Look carefully at your requirements and assess whether your stack works cohesively. What unique requirements do you have? Industry-specific, regulatory, etc? Do these impact your technology choices, and does your chosen technology offer the flexibility to accommodate them?
Consider whether you can truly use your first-party data. Think about the unified customer experience you're aiming to deliver versus the risk of a mismatched stack. Product catalog integration and the ability to incorporate in-store orders are often overlooked at this stage but matter a great deal further down the road.
Shaping the Future of Retail Media at Kevel
John's appointment comes at a moment when retail media is moving beyond its early stages of growth and into a more complex, data-intensive, and AI-influenced era. The questions retailers and technology providers face today, around agentic commerce, first-party data activation, and advertiser self-service, require the kind of product thinking that John has spent his career developing.
His experience shaping retail media platforms at CitrusAd and Epsilon, combined with Kevel's API-first infrastructure, positions the team well to address the real challenges retailers and advertisers are working through right now.
