Quick answer: Art Sebastian has built retail media from nearly every seat at the table: merchandising at Albertsons and Jewel-Osco, data at IRI, brand marketing at Kraft Heinz, ecommerce at Meijer, and the retail media program he built from the ground up at Casey's. Now running the advisory firm NexChapter, Sebastian argues that most retailers already have the technology they need. What's holding retail media back is organizational alignment, unclear ownership of results, and data that isn't ready for an agentic future.
Retail media conversations tend to default to technology: which platform, which measurement stack, which walled garden to prioritize. Art Sebastian has spent over 30 years in retail, most of it building the programs those platforms plug into, and his read on the industry is different. On a recent episode of Unlocking Retail Media, he told Kevel CEO James Avery that the technology retailers used to wish for is now widely available. What hasn't caught up is the talent and the operating model behind it.
Sebastian's path through the industry is unique: merchandising at Albertsons and Jewel-Osco, data at IRI, brand marketing at Kraft Heinz, ecommerce at Meijer, and five years building Casey's retail media program from scratch before founding the advisory firm NexChapter. That mix gives him a view of retail media from the brand side, the retailer side, and now the consulting seat in between. Below are the questions retailers and brands are actually asking, and how Art answers them.
What Makes Casey's Retail Media Network Different From a Grocery or Big-Box Program?
Quick answer: Casey's built its network around the fuel pump, not just the aisle, tying loyalty-authenticated pump screens, in-store audio, and app ordering into one orchestrated experience instead of outsourcing pieces to third parties.
Casey's is a Fortune 500 convenience and fuel retailer based in Iowa, with nearly 3,000 sites spread across 20 states, most of them in small towns of 20,000 people or fewer. It is also, somewhat improbably, the fifth-largest pizza chain in the country. Sebastian spent five years there, moving from leading digital transformation to overseeing all of marketing, advertising, media, and PR.
The first few years were foundational: building the tech stack, prioritizing first-party data, and giving the company a reason to engage customers directly. Casey's Access, the retail media program Sebastian eventually launched, gave advertisers access to that data and inventory. The part that sets a fuel and convenience retailer apart from a grocer, he said, is the fuel court itself. Customers stand at the pump for a minute or two with nowhere else to look, which makes pump screens a genuine media channel, not just signage.
Rather than outsourcing those screens to a third-party network, a common shortcut for chains without the resources to run it themselves, Casey's kept control in-house. That let the team tie pump messaging to email campaigns and in-store signage so a customer's experience felt coordinated rather than like three separate ad systems talking past each other.
"When you come into the store and there are digital screens or shelf talkers and all that sort of stuff, everything ties in." - Art Sebastian
It also created a cleaner attribution story. Once a customer authenticates with a loyalty number at the pump, the network knows they're on-site and can connect that exposure to whatever happens next in the store.
Do Trade Dollars Matter Less Than Performance Budgets in Retail Media?
Quick answer: Not to the retailer, according to Sebastian. Getting hung up on where the money comes from is the wrong question. The dollars that matter are the ones tied to a program that can prove impact.
A recurring frustration in retail media is that a lot of spend is still trade money wearing a new label, budget retailers felt entitled to before anyone measured whether it worked. Sebastian's advice to retailer clients is to stop worrying about the source of the budget and focus entirely on building a program efficient enough to earn more of it.
Whether the money is repurposed trade budget, a larger trade allocation the retailer didn't previously have access to, or a headquarters brand budget, he said it doesn't change what the retailer needs to do. Build the best program possible. Drive value. The source of the dollars sorts itself out once the results are real.
"Dollars are dollars, drive the business, and deliver impact for your advertising clients." - Art Sebastian
What Do Brands Actually Look For When They Measure Retail Media Success?
Quick answer: It depends on the campaign objective, but most brands are ultimately looking for a lift in sales or an incremental return on the specific dollars invested, backed by secondary metrics like impressions, click-through rate, and purchase frequency.
Sebastian pushed back on the idea that there's one universal retail media metric. A new product launch gets judged differently than a campaign built to defend base business or acquire new-to-category customers. But underneath the variation, brands are usually asking one of two questions: did this drive a lift in sales, or did it generate a return on the specific dollars invested.
Below that top-line answer sits a longer list of supporting metrics: impressions, click-through rate, store visits, and whether the campaign closed the gap in a customer's purchase cycle. Sebastian's summary of what it all adds up to was more practical than any individual metric.
"It boils down to am I meeting my objective and am I growing the business." - Art Sebastian
Where Should Retail Media Sit on a Retailer's Org Chart?
Quick answer: For the largest retailers, retail media typically becomes its own business unit, the way Amazon and Walmart have structured it. For mid-size and smaller retailers, it usually sits inside marketing, and Sebastian says that's the right call, not a compromise.
Sebastian has seen retail media organized nearly every possible way: as an independent division reporting to a CEO, folded into merchandising, or run out of marketing. His view is that scale decides the answer. Once a retail media program reaches the size of Amazon, Walmart, Target, or Kroger, it makes sense as its own business unit. Below that scale, marketing is usually the right home, because that team is already oriented around the customer experience.
What matters more than where retail media reports, he argued, is how much it collaborates across the organization regardless of its reporting line. The team needs a close relationship with advertising, PR, and marketing counterparts, tight coordination with the technology providers running the actual capabilities, and increasingly, a real relationship with merchandising and vendor partners. Sebastian also pointed to two collaborators that rarely get mentioned: accounting, because of how the dollars flow, and legal, because of how fast the regulatory environment is changing.
The clearest structural fix he's seen work is folding retail media and marketing programs into the joint business planning process with vendors, so merchants and vendor partners are aligned on the plan before anyone builds the media campaign around it.
Where Is AI Actually Changing Retail Media Right Now?
Quick answer: Sebastian sees retailers split into three groups: those with dedicated resources and a roadmap, those running pilots in an experiment zone, and those still in wait-and-see mode. His advice to all three is the same: build a plan, and decide what you're not going to do.
Every client and every friend in the industry, in Sebastian's words, is talking about AI right now. But the maturity gap between retailers is wide. Some have committed real resources and built a roadmap. Others are testing and learning through pilots without a broader strategy yet. A third group is still watching from the sidelines.
NexChapter recently hosted a group of retailers in Des Moines for an event Sebastian calls Intersect AI, built around a framework for practical AI adoption. The starting point of that framework is deceptively simple: because the word AI means different things to different people inside a single retail organization, from large language model agents to back-end automation to something else entirely, the first job is getting everyone talking about the same thing.
Sebastian's broader read on the industry is that the technology gap has flipped from where it used to be. Retailers spent years wishing for tools that didn't exist yet. Now the tools exist, and the constraint has moved to people and process.
"The talent and the operating model hasn't fully caught up." - Art Sebastian
How Should Retailers Prepare for Agentic Commerce?
Quick answer: By treating data readiness as the entry ticket. Sebastian says the only wrong move on agentic commerce is ignoring it, and retailers who haven't cleaned up basic listing, pricing, and product data risk not showing up in an agent's consideration set at all.
Sebastian is unambiguous about where he stands on agentic commerce: engaged, and pushing retailers to move now rather than wait for the picture to clarify. His starting point is unglamorous. Before anything else, retailers need their basic data in order: an accurate Google Business listing, correct hours, current pricing, and full product assortment. From there, the harder work begins, adding a semantic layer to product data, since agents interpret full phrases and product attributes rather than matching keywords.
He laid out three broad paths for retailers to engage: embedded, where a retailer works within the agentic capabilities its existing vendor partners are already building; platform, where a retailer builds on top of a broader agentic platform; and fully proprietary, which requires an in-house data science team and the kind of capital only a handful of the largest retailers can justify. For most retailers, Sebastian recommends starting embedded, since the integration and the relationship already exist.
Where retail media fits into that future, in his view, is less about agents replacing a shopping trip and more about agents shaping which retailer even gets considered.
"You're not even in the consideration set if your data's not available for the agents." - Art Sebastian
Sebastian expects agentic commerce to land unevenly across categories. Nobody expects an agent to pick out a customer's milk and pizza at a convenience store, he said, but an agent might well decide which convenience store a customer stops at on the way home. As grocery, convenience, and quick-service restaurants increasingly compete for the same meal decision, that kind of routing influence matters more than it sounds.
Key Takeaways at a Glance
Does it matter whether retail media budget comes from trade dollars or brand budgets?Not to the retailer, according to Sebastian. What matters is building a program that proves impact, regardless of where the dollars originate.
What metric do brands care about most in retail media?
Usually a lift in sales or an incremental return on the specific dollars invested, backed by supporting metrics like impressions and click-through rate.
Where should retail media report inside a retail organization?
Its own business unit at the largest scale, inside marketing for most other retailers. Collaboration across teams matters more than the reporting line.
What's the first step in preparing for agentic commerce?
Getting basic data accurate and available, business listings, pricing, and product assortment, before investing in more advanced semantic layers.
What should retailers avoid when it comes to AI adoption?
Ignoring it entirely. Sebastian says every retailer needs a plan, even an early one, and should be explicit about what they're choosing not to do yet.
Conclusion: The Technology Caught Up. The Org Chart Didn't.
Sebastian's view cuts against a lot of retail media conversation, which still treats the next platform or measurement tool as the unlock. His 30 years of experience across nearly every seat at the table point somewhere else: the technology retailers used to dream about is mostly available now. What's missing is the operating model to use it well, the alignment between marketing and merchandising, the clarity on what AI means inside a specific building, and the basic data hygiene an agent needs before it will even consider a retailer.
That's the same structural argument Kevel makes from the infrastructure side: owning the stack only matters if the organization around it is built to use that ownership well. As agentic commerce moves from experiment to expectation, the retailers ready to compete will be the ones who treat data readiness and organizational alignment as seriously as they treat the technology itself.
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 and commerce media.
Listen to the full conversation with Art Sebastian on Unlocking Retail Media.
