Last December, Hélène Trad joined Kingfisher as its Director of Retail Media – a move that was the culmination of numerous roles in customer insight across major organisations like Nielsen, Cadbury, Amazon Ads, and Aimia UK (now Nectar360).
She spoke to Retail Media Age about how her career led her to retail media and why driving sales is just the beginning of retail media’s capabilities, as well as why she sees retail media as being on the verge of realising its potential as a brand-building engine.
What is your role and what does it entail?
I lead Kingfisher’s Group Retail Media and Data Monetisation team. We partner with our banners (brands including B&Q and Screwfix in the UK and Castorama and Brico Dépôt in Europe) to build media and insight propositions that enable vendors, sellers and non-endemic advertisers to connect with our unique customer base – in ways that are commercially effective for them and valuable for our customers.
At the Group level, we focus on where scale matters most – building the right tech and data foundations, compelling propositions, and the right partnerships. Each banner then tailors this to its own customer and commercial priorities. It’s a constant balance between creating scale, consistency and local relevance.
How did you first become interested in retail media and move into it?
It started with my graduate role at Geest (now Bakkavor), working in category management at a time when customer insight was emerging as a key growth driver. Working directly with buyers at Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Safeway, I saw how customer insights could shape ranging and merchandising decisions that genuinely moved the needle in stores.
These experiences were reflected in my subsequent roles at Nielsen and Cadbury, and later at Aimia (now Nectar360), where I helped build Sainsbury’s insight platform and drove adoption with its trading teams. That was also when coupon-at-till and targeted email were taking off. I saw first-hand how customer data could reach well beyond category management into targeted communication and measurable outcomes.
From there, retail media felt like a natural progression – first shaping the proposition at Sainsbury’s, then at Amazon Ads, where I learned how a retailer can compete in the media world through its first-party audiences.
The common thread throughout has been helping brands and retailers win with customers. Retail media brings all of that together.
What most excites you about the industry today and what might happen next in retail media?
Retail media has proven it drives sales – but we’re barely scratching the surface. The real opportunity lies in retailers’ first-party audiences: the signals generated when customers browse, search, compare and buy.
That gives suppliers and non-endemic advertisers something genuinely powerful – the ability to reach people based not just on who they are or what they’re actively interested in right now, but on real purchase history and behaviour. That combination of data showing past and present intent is far richer than anything traditional media can offer.
This also shifts the ambition well beyond conversion. Retail media is moving from “buying space” to “activating audiences” wherever customers spend their time – be that on-site, in-store, or, increasingly, off-site across video, social and connected TV. That’s what makes it a genuine brand-building engine.
And AI will put that shift on fast-forward. It will help develop more relevant audiences, creative, real-time optimisation, and smarter measurement. If the industry gets this right, retail media won’t just be another channel – it will become one of the most exciting intersections of advertising, data and commerce we’ve ever seen.
Who is your biggest inspiration in the retail media sector and why?
I would have to say Amazon Ads. I spent four years there, and what stayed with me was the relentless focus on the customer and on innovation – making advertising more relevant and more impactful.
In that time, I watched the business evolve fast: from early on-site video formats to Prime Video, and from a stronger DSP to propositions that made commercial sense for a much wider range of advertisers (well beyond vendors and sellers on Amazon). The ambition was always expanding.
What inspired me most, though, was seeing how the best leaders navigated the natural tension between retail and advertising. Those short-term frictions are real – but the leaders I admired had the vision to look past them and focus on long-term value for both sides of the equation. That combination of customer obsession, bold innovation and long-term thinking is something I carry with me today.
What one retail media campaign or strategy that you’ve been involved in are you proudest of?
At Amazon, I was given an interesting challenge: to accelerate growth in Europe for a business already growing fast. This required a complete paradigm shift for me – away from focusing on big brands with big budgets, towards unlocking the potential of hundreds of thousands of marketplace sellers with a very different mindset and objectives.
That’s where I truly learned what strategy at scale means – you have to build frameworks that work at massive volume without losing effectiveness. We overachieved in year one, and the approach was rolled out across the US and Japan. I’d like to think I played some small part in the growth Amazon Ads continues to deliver today.
Read the stories of more leaders in retail media in our My Road to Retail Media series.
