In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, Kevel CEO James Avery sits down with Ben Johnson, Senior Director of Chewy Ads, to discuss why strong product strategy—not just technology or sales—separates thriving retail media networks from those that stall.
Retail media networks are proliferating across the industry, but many hit a ceiling within their first eighteen months. The difference between networks that scale and those that plateau often comes down to a single question: who owns the product vision?
In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, James speaks with Ben Johnson—who previously built retail media at Coupang, South Korea’s largest e-commerce platform, before joining Chewy—about the critical, and often overlooked, role of product management in retail media. Here are the five biggest takeaways from their conversation.
“The romanticized version of a product manager is what a lot of people like to say: mini CEO. In my opinion, that romanticized definition is what a PM should truly do.”
— Ben Johnson, Senior Director of Chewy Ads
Johnson described product management as the discipline that synthesizes organizational noise into signal— a connective tissue that enables speed, alignment, and long-term thinking across the organization. In retail media networks, this role becomes even more critical because the ads team owns none of the surfaces where ads appear. Every placement requires cross-functional coordination with teams that have their own objectives, timelines, and success metrics.
Strong product managers don’t simply execute marching orders. They guide decision-making across engineering, analytics, sales, and merchant teams, ensuring that everyone understands not just what is being built, but why it matters. Johnson emphasized that this connective function is what allows retail media networks to move quickly without breaking the core shopping experience.
As Johnson put it, “If you hire the right product leader, what you get is a leader in every division of what your organizational structure needs to serve.”
Traditional hiring often prioritizes background and credentials. Johnson argued that retail media networks need a different approach when staffing product roles.
“Anyone can be a good product manager,” he explained. “The cognitive diversity that you can have people from different disciplines be successful in this role is what makes it so nebulous.”
Rather than focusing solely on retail media or ad tech experience, Johnson recommended evaluating how candidates synthesize ideas and manage complexity. Someone with a sales background brings different strengths than someone with an engineering or analytics background—and both can succeed if they demonstrate empathy for stakeholders and customers alike.
“Be very deliberate in the expectations you have when you’re sourcing candidates,” Johnson advised. “Ensure that you’re not looking for people that are only just good on paper, but you’re asking the hard questions about how they synthesize ideas, how they deal with a large cross-functional mess that is created when you’re a new org trying to work with established teams.”
Great product leaders are defined less by where they’ve worked and more by how they think.
Johnson joined Chewy assuming he could apply the same playbook he used at Coupang, where he helped build one of the first retail media networks in Asia. That assumption lasted less than a day.
“I came to Chewy thinking, ‘Okay, playbook’s ready, let’s just use that and I’m good to go,’” Johnson shared. “And then within 24 hours of being at the company, I had to throw out that playbook.”
For Chewy, this was due to its business model, which is deeply rooted in subscription through Autoship. Pet parents set up recurring deliveries for food, medicine, and supplies, creating a fundamentally different customer relationship than one-time purchases. From the moment a shopper arrives, the opportunity to win lifetime value is immediate.
“The intent is there and the opportunity to win a customer for their lifetime value is there right away,” Johnson explained. “So we’ve engineered our ad platform and brought to market—not only a campaign execution side—but a reporting and analytics suite that emphasizes the upside of that LTV driven by our subscription-based business.”
Advertisers choose specific retail media networks because they have a hypothesis about why that platform will perform differently. Product teams must validate that hypothesis by building capabilities that reflect the retailer’s unique customer behavior.
Retail media success isn’t copy-and-paste—it’s built around how customers actually shop.
When Chewy first launched its retail media network, every experiment required senior leadership to convene and make trade-off decisions in real time. Johnson described decision-making as slow, and definitions of success varied across teams.
He addressed this by establishing clear frameworks for what constitutes good, neutral, or bad outcomes—not just for the ads team, but for every internal partner.
“We didn’t really know how to define good, neutral or bad in the context of an AB test. And over time we got stronger and stronger at that.”
—Ben Johnson, Senior Director of Chewy Ads
Different teams own different stages of the shopping funnel, each with their own success metrics. By aligning on expectations upfront, Chewy eliminated bottlenecks and improved trust.
“If something wasn’t controversial in the neutral or nearing the bad, and it was just good to go across, it’s just a green light,” he explained. “Go launch and keep moving forward with innovation.”
Johnson repeatedly emphasized one key point: product managers in retail media must care about more than ad revenue.
“Figure out if they’re going to think about more than just the ads themselves,” he advised. “We’re living in a world where retail media networks are growing, and a huge distinction about the ads in retail from the ads from your old print to digital publishers is that it's no longer tertiary content. It is the content itself.”
In retail media, ads aren’t adjacent to the experience—they are part of it. Sponsored products function as potential solutions, not interruptions. That makes empathy for the customer relationship essential.
Johnson contrasted Chewy’s approach with Amazon’s high ad density, noting that while Amazon may appear ad-heavy to industry insiders, it often works for shoppers focused on finding a specific product.
“Trying to be like them is a race to the bottom. You can’t compete with that type of horsepower that those organizations have. You need to carve out your niche and understand what your customers want versus copy, paste of features, which you can never keep up with.”
Many retail media networks launch without dedicated product leadership, relying instead on vendors to define their roadmap. That approach may work initially, but it limits differentiation and long-term control.
Retailers should ask themselves: Who is writing the five-year story of this network? Who is defining the building blocks that make that story achievable? And who is ensuring the platform reflects what makes the customer relationship unique?
Without strong product leadership, retail media networks default to cookie-cutter implementations. The networks that succeed—like Chewy—invest in product strategy early and empower teams to think beyond ad serving technology to the full customer experience.
Johnson’s final advice is simple but powerful: “If the shoppers are happy and you are serving ads while they’re happy, you’re doing something right. Your advertisers are going to be happy if those two other events are happening because it’s just going to come through in performance.”
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 Ben Johnson here.
