Retail Media Leaders From John Lewis, Douglas, ABOUT YOU, and Halfords Compare Notes on Scaling From Scratch

Building a retail media business rarely starts with a clean strategic slate. It usually starts, as one panelist put it, with people “doing this off the side of the desk for years” before anyone formalizes it. At Retail Media Pioneers, a panel brought together four retail media leaders: Alex Knapman, Retail Media Lead at Halfords; Charina Lumley, Managing Director of Retail Media at Douglas; Jemma Haley, Retail Media Business & Proposition Strategy at John Lewis; and Carolin Oberhaeuser, Head of Brand Relations & Retail Media at ABOUT YOU.

Strategy starts with proving the business case internally

The panelists described strikingly different starting points when asked how each retailer built a retail media strategy from the ground up. Oberhaeuser explained that ABOUT YOU, as a fashion tech company, built its own tools rather than relying on external ad tech. The team treated the early work as internal advocacy. “Our strategy was directly to do, I would say, lobbyism internally for retail media,” she said. She described collaboration across tech, wholesale, and marketing teams, work made easier by the company’s relative youth as a business founded in 2014.

Haley described a different path at John Lewis. Retail media capability had existed informally within commercial teams for roughly a decade before the company created a central function. The turning point was a business case built on a specific number: consulting work suggested the partnership could potentially double its revenue over five years by increasing the maturity of how it ran retail media. That projection became the justification for investment.

Lumley, at Douglas, described a more layered challenge. The beauty retailer’s century-old trade and co-op marketing function already had an established value proposition, so a newer retail media team had to complement it rather than compete against it. “We are simultaneously trying to grow retail media with a different and more robust value proposition, as our co-op marketing teams, but in a completely different way,” she said.

Knapman summarized what he saw as the ideal, and the more common reality. In a perfect scenario, senior stakeholders agree upfront on customer experience boundaries and which advertisers are an acceptable fit before anyone sets targets. In practice, he said, “you kind of get landed with a number and then struggling to hit the number.” That means defining the strategy and educating the business often happens in parallel with execution rather than before it.

Cross-functional teams and quick wins build internal trust

Haley named several groups when asked which internal stakeholders matter most. Commercial teams. Customer marketing, which covers onsite, offsite, CRM, and loyalty. Product and tech partners. Data teams. These are the groups John Lewis depends on most heavily.

Lumley added legal and data protection teams to that list. She framed them as a group that can either unlock or block a retail media initiative, so she treats them as a core partner rather than a late-stage checkpoint. “The best asset is a retailer,” she said, arguing that collaboration with data and privacy teams “is really, truly, one of the best ways that you can accelerate your business.”

Knapman argued for starting with quick, high-margin wins, particularly onsite inventory, to demonstrate revenue before pushing into more complex offsite and data-driven propositions. “As you get the buy-in from the business, if you see the money flowing in… you can grow the themes,” he said. He also pointed to vendor partners as translators for internal audiences. Specialist partners often explain their own products in language that lands better with senior stakeholders than a retail media team’s internal pitch would.

Partnerships need cultural fit, not just capability

Haley emphasized alignment on long-term vision over short-term capability alone when asked what makes a good external partnership. She looks for partners who understand “the differences between Waitrose versus John Lewis” and who share the same ambition for where the business wants to be in five years.

Lumley described looking for partners who can cover gaps across measurement, customer relationships, innovation, and data privacy, without creating what she called “a frankenstack” of disconnected tools. Knapman agreed that chasing short-term revenue at the expense of sustainable growth is a common mistake. He said the most valuable partners are the ones willing to help a lean internal team make the case to the wider business, not just execute campaigns.

Measurement remains an unfinished conversation

The panel’s final topic, cut short by time, was measurement. Oberhaeuser described it as an evolving challenge. Campaigns judged two or three years ago focused almost entirely on short-term performance, she said, while brands now ask for full-funnel visibility and compare KPIs across platforms with different attribution models.

Haley said John Lewis is still working to standardize basic KPIs. At the same time, the team is improving the upfront conversation with brands about what a campaign is actually meant to achieve, since misalignment there makes later measurement look inconsistent even when it isn’t.