Orange Apron, The Home Depot’s retail media network, has been busy.
Today, the company’s division announced a new self-serve platform called Orange Access, which offers The Home Depot buyers a single platform to plan, activate, optimize, and measure their campaigns.
To support the self-serve functionality of Orange Access, the platform will include an insights dashboard to easily adjust settings and optimize campaigns to achieve goals and meet KPIs. Orange Access will also provide access to new creative tools for easier ad creation.
The technology powering Orange Apron comes from Vantage, a “retail media orchestration layer.” This partnership follows The Home Depot’s announcement last month of an expanded relationship with Pentaleap to enhance its on-site Sponsored Products ad strategy. Clearly, The Home Depot is investing in its retail media tech and business.
Why This Matters:
The technology here is interesting for the retail media market as it helps retailers and advertisers grapple with fragmentation and complexity.
“Orange Access, powered by Vantage, marks a major milestone in retail media,” says Aran Hamilton, CEO and co-founder of Vantage, in a statement. “For the first time, a retailer and its advertisers can access a comprehensive suite of capabilities—from planning and activation to measurement and business intelligence—through a single, unified platform. As more ad dollars shift to retail media, this combination of capabilities and ease of use is essential.”
That’s the key—retail media spending is skyrocketing, and as that happens, making the process easier to manage is important. With that in mind, Hamilton says Vantage integrates a retailer’s systems, workflows, and data into a single platform with one login. It’s essentially a one-stop solution for managing campaigns across all channels—on-site, off-site, and even in-store. This has a two-sided benefit: it simplifies ad-buying on Orange Apron for advertisers and makes Orange Apron more attractive as an option in the growing retail media market.
Also, says Hamilton, as more retail media adtech solutions emerge, Vantage can bring them together on its platform. (Pentaleap, for example.)
Experts React:
In the Orange Access launch press release, Melanie Babcock, VP of Orange Apron Media and Monetization, said, “Our new platform empowers advertisers with easy-to-use, self-service tools and insights to create impactful campaigns to help them advance their business.”
Our Take:
WARC forecasts global retail media ad investment to reach $153.3 billion in 2024, a 13.7% increase from the previous year. As spending grows, self-serve capabilities and intuitive tools are becoming important, particularly as retail media diversifies with off-site extensions, new inventory, and data activation deals. In-store retail media is also gaining traction.
Basically, this space is growing more complex and fragmented. This creates the need for unification. With Orange Access, The Home Depot recognizes that and is trying to deliver, in partnership with Vantage.
