There’s sawdust on Madison Avenue. The Home Depot is giving its retail media network, first piloted in 2018, a renovation: Retail Media+ is now Orange Apron Media. Get the reference behind the new name? Great.
The idea behind the rebrand is to stand out in the ever-congested retail media landscape, Melanie Babcock, VP of Orange Apron Media and monetization at The Home Depot, told Marketing Brew.
The Home Depot claims to have close to 200 million individual customers, and, Babcock said, some 2,000 advertisers are currently using the company’s retail media platform. (Brands don’t have to be in the home improvement industry to advertise there—State Farm is one of the company’s biggest advertisers, she told us.) The media network has also begun testing selling programmatic inventory, with the goal of bringing even more non-endemic advertisers to the platform.
Crowded aisles: If there’s an audience, be they shoppers, passengers, or handyfolk, there’s an advertising network. And ad dollars will likely follow.
- The category is expected to grow to $166 billion by 2025, and will account for about 20% of all digital media spend this year, according to eMarketer. For reference, Walmart Connect generated about $3.4 billion in advertising revenue last year, according to the company’s Q4 earnings report.
- Retail media spend increased by 35% year over year in the first two months of 2024, according to the advertising intelligence company Guideline, up 59% compared to the same period in 2022.
Lowes, the other home improvement giant on the block, opened its own retail media network, One Roof Media, in 2021. Kroger has a retail media network, as do Target, Uber, and Lyft, while the Wall Street Journal reported in November that United Airlines is reportedly considering creating one. Oh, and there’s that humble little startup out of Seattle called Amazon.
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Such a crowded market has made things slightly more complicated for advertisers, leading to what industry analyst Eric Seufert, author of Mobile Dev Memo, recently described as “the retail media measurement nightmare.”
Home renovation: To help address that, The Home Depot announced a clean room integration with Habu, which could give clients more data about their performance on the platform. But Babcock warned against making apples-to-apples comparisons: The Home Depot’s customer experience isn’t exactly the same as a more traditional retailer or grocer, she said, since buying a fridge or roofing materials isn’t the same as buying eggs or socks. For that reason, it can segment its data by contextual projects.
“If you’re redoing your kitchen, you’re redoing your kitchen,” Babcock said. “It doesn’t matter what size home you’re in or what stage of life you’re in.”
Customers might normally only visit The Home Depot eight or nine times a year, but if someone is in the middle of a renovation project, they might come in five times on a given Saturday, Babcock said.
“It’s a very different customer mindset. The frequency of those purchases are extremely different…so I don’t want to have a single incrementality formula that is being compared across all retail media when ours is, like, ‘Well, our customer only buys that product once every five years,’” she said. “I’ve got a different animal here.”