Meet the Marketer: Sebastian Dennis

Sebastian Dennis describes his role as a team sport. Here, he shares his thoughts on Retail Media, reporting, and why he champions AI and automation.

Can you tell us your name and role? 

Sebastian Dennis, Digital Commerce & Retail Media Lead for Unilever. 

What do you love about what you do day-to-day? 

I’m fortunate, as I get to work across all our teams and brands. This means I’m constantly translating big brand ideas into actionable campaigns across both online and in-store channels. On any given day, that means partnering with the Retail Media teams at Cartology, aligning internal plans, and making sure the work is measurable and commercially sound.  It’s a genuine team sport, and a special shout to all the customers and category teams at Unilever who support the execution of our campaigns.

What excites you about the opportunities for brands in Retail Media?

The ability to reach customers throughout the shopping funnel in innovative ways. Retail Media gives us the ability to deliver our crafted brand messages consistently right through the funnel. No other media mix allows us to reach the customers from impression through to at-shelf across NZ.

What learnings have you gained from using Retail Media through the years? 

Test and learn. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Over the last few years, we’ve trialled a massive variety of campaigns and assets across our brands. There have been some duds along the way! But we are now in a place where we have a deep understanding of what mix works best for the shoppers of our brands.

Retail Media is changing fast. We strive to adopt and test the latest assets in the Retail Media mix in an effort to ensure we stay competitive.

Campaigns' effectiveness over optics. I am a big believer in leveraging Retail Media networks to drive meaningful ROI. To achieve this, our activations are always wide-ranging and scoped to ensure we have as much store coverage as reasonably possible.

What changes are you seeing in customer behaviour and how are your marketing tactics and objectives changing in response? 

We have made a significant shift in our marketing strategy to focus on social media in the last 12 months. Fundamentally, we view this as the point where customers begin their shopping journey. We’re backing this ‘Social First’ approach by committing at least 50% of our total media budgets to social. For Retail Media, this means we’re starting to bring assets that have been created for social (including influencers) through to our retail media assets to have consistent messaging across the shopping journey.

What new technologies, such as AI or automation, are you most excited about, and how do you plan to leverage them?

I’m a bit of an AI and automation fan-boy. Fortunately, Unilever has adopted AI as a strategic priority, so I’ve got a few platforms to play with. I’m attempting to build a ‘reporting bot’ that will ingest our sales data, promo plans and even media campaigns. The theory is that the output will give us actionable insights into what factors are driving performance and ROI on specific assets across the media mix. It’s currently a work in progress! 

How do your brand and trade marketing teams collaborate to build effective, full-funnel Retail Media strategies?

In full transparency, this is something I’m working on constantly. Retail Media has only really had dedicated Unilever support for the last couple of years. This means we’ve been busy building from scratch the best way to work internally and externally. My key focus for 2026 has been very early alignment between all our teams on what our ‘big bets’ will be. In 2026, it will be the first time our aligned brand/marketing and sales strategy will have retail media included with specific actions for each of the team members.

How do you define and measure success in Retail Media, and how do you align on KPIs between your brand and commercial teams?

We have quite clear measurements of success that are specific to the budgets that fund campaigns. To put it simply, commercial teams measure success on a direct $ ROI. Brand/marketing teams take a more holistic brand-building approach (impressions/eyeballs, share of voice, etc). Depending on the campaign and where the funding is coming from, we’ll invest in different assets that we know drive the results necessary to be successful.