At Advertising Week, Melanie Babcock, The Home Depot’s VP of Orange Apron Media and Monetization, made me laugh.
“We’re a specialty retail media network,” she said during a panel. “And I know a lot of people hear about the big retail media networks out there, but, you know, we’re pretty big, too.” That, my friend, is an understatement.
Orange Apron Media was one of the first retail media networks, launching in 2018. It was so early that the company called it Retail Media+ (that’s a tough Google search), before rebranding to Orange Apron earlier this year.
Today, Orange Apron has roughly 2,000 advertising customers trying to reach 198 million The Home Depot shoppers online and in nearly 2,400 stores. The company’s website also sees 3.5 billion visits annually. So, yes, The Home Depot is a major player in this space.
Babcock spoke on an Advertising Week panel to promote Orange Access, the company’s new self-serve ad platform powered by Vantage, a “retail media orchestration layer.” The platform gives Orange Apron buyers one place to plan, activate, optimize, and measure their campaigns.
Beyond the product, though, Babcock had interesting things to say about the company’s approach to retail media. Here are a few quick highlights:
Data-Driven:
“I think we’re at a really interesting moment of change in the retail industry,” Babcock said. “It’s data-driven, incorporating all those different touchpoints, and focused on operational excellence, using and sharing data effectively.”
Still, she acknowledged the growing pains that come with handling data at scale, which prompted The Home Depot to invest in building its own tech to make sense of their data as adoption grows.
“From a technology perspective, it’s really about structured data,” she said. “It has been quite a journey, and we’ve learned that structuring data was a challenge. We had to build technology to manage it.”
In-Store Opportunity:
When asked how she felt “about the convergence of in-store, off-site, and on-site” and whether these need to “come together” for advertisers, Babcock replied emphatically, “It must converge.”
“Our stores are 90% of our traffic,” she said. “We all think about the app and the website, and, boy, are those important parts of our business. But at the end of the day, the stores are where the majority of our customers go.” She added, “The store is really the biggest opportunity for us to explore.”
Still, Babcock acknowledged the complexity of integrating ads into Home Depot’s unique store-and-warehouse hybrid experience, where “a forklift can drive right past you.” She added, “I don’t know the last time you were in a mall and a forklift drove by, but that does pose challenges for us. We are a working and operating warehouse, so how do we bring advertising into a space that really needs a digital interface for those ads?”
Why This Matters:
WARC predicts retail media ad spend globally will hit $153.3 billion this year, about a 14% increase from last year. As competition heats up, retail and commerce media players must differentiate. The Home Depot is investing in areas like data-targeting and in-store opportunities to stand out.
On the data side, advertisers can tap into Orange Apron’s nearly 200 million shoppers, yes, but Babcock says advertisers get deeper granularity, targeting shoppers based on behaviors like home renovation projects, rather than relying solely on demographics. That data is also richer because it includes in-store behavior.
Speaking of, in-store, retail media is set to boom. By 2028, in-store digital ad spend is expected to pass $1 billion. The Home Depot, with its nearly 2,400 locations, is well-positioned to capitalize here. This focus on targeting granularity and in-store experiences, while connecting the two, can set The Home Depot apart.
Experts React:
More interesting perspective from Babcock on her panel here:
“I think that we have a lot to uncover and discover about what is monetizable at our company. When we own more information about someone in their home, we actually have an idea in our customer, an idea in their home. A home isn’t a separate identity in our database, but we have a lot of things that we can think about from a monetization perspective that would be appealing to not just a supplier, but maybe a non-endemic supplier, right, who is a financial services company, for example, or an automobile company.”
Our Take:
Final take – The Home Depot RMN, in our opinion, seems as interesting as larger players, like Kroger. The customer journey for The Home Depot is also more fragmented (or at least less straightforward), making the need for more robust targeting and in-store ads even greater.
