NEW YORK — Home Depot continues to expand the capabilities of its retail media network as the channel surges amid investment from competitors in the retail vertical and beyond. The home improvement retailer last week announced the launch of a self-service ad platform that was a topic of discussion during a panel at Advertising Week New York on Monday.

Orange Access allows advertisers to plan, activate, optimize and report on media campaigns run on Orange Apron Media, the retail media offering that Home Depot rebranded earlier this year. The new tool brings together on-site, off-site and in-store ad units for suppliers of all sizes, from Kohler and Samsung to the “Melanie’s Plumbing and Supply” companies of the world, explained Melanie Babcock, vice president of Orange Apron Media and monetization.

“We have thousands of small suppliers who may only have one to three products… and they don't know anything about how to buy an ad, so we have to help them succeed inside of Home Depot,” the executive said during the panel. 

“We have to think about everyone from the big guys all the way down to the small and we believe Orange Access provides this capability for every supplier at Home Depot to be successful.”

The right partners

Home Depot bills itself as the top home improvement brand in North America and boasts more than 200 million customers and 3.5 billion annual visits to its website. The company serves both homeowners and professionals, two different customer types with different purchase cycles and shopping paths. In an effort to bring its suppliers closer to those customer segments, Orange Apron Media has focused on the pillars of scale, service and experience.

To boost the experience of Orange Apron Media and launch Orange Access, Home Depot tapped orchestration platform Vantage to bring together the various teams across the company that support retail media and integrate the technology needed to serve ads.

“There were about eight different pieces of technology that were required in order to run an ad,” said Aran Hamilton, CEO of Vantage, during the panel. “Ads were taking a day to pull together, and that was not going to scale to the number that Melanie and the team really wanted to hit.”

Beyond its work with Home Depot, Vantage this week announced that its comprehensive retail media platform — previously available in limited release — will be available to all retailers. The platform allows retailers like Home Depot to scale and optimize media operations and provides real-time sales and market insights that are crucial as media network offerings proliferate and chase ad dollars.

“Retail media is no longer a siloed business on the side of retail,” Hamilton said. “It is becoming an integral part of the overall retail business model.”

Ad-serving company Kevel announced today (Oct. 8) that Orange Apron Media will use its API-based Retail Media Cloud solution to help power its media offering. Additionally, Home Depot has enlisted retail media platform Pentaleap, which offers an ad server, a publisher manager and an API that helps bring tech and ad units together.

“It's no longer just this one channel,” Pentaleap CEO Andreas Reiffen said during the panel. “There are these offsite and in-store channels, so somehow, you need to orchestrate those different things.”

An inflection point

Retail media might have begun as a “skunkworks” project for many companies, but its rapid growth is beginning to fundamentally change the way that retailers do business, Vantage’s Hamilton explained. Despite being an early adopter of retail media, Home Depot is still facing the evolving challenges shared by many companies standing up and investing in media offerings. 

“I talk to a lot of retailers out there, and they’re all having the same problem scaling the retail media offering,” Hamilton explained. “It comes down to some combination of having a hard time scaling the people, the processes or the technology, and unfortunately, all too often having a hard time with all three.”

Home Depot and Orange Apron Media believe its partnerships with Vantage, Pentaleap and Kevel will help solve for all three issues along its retail media journey. For Babcock, that also means exploring the second half of her title as her team works to find new areas of monetization with both endemic and non-endemic suppliers. The company, for example, has separate IDs for both customers and their homes that could be useful for a financial services company, and giant parking lots that automobile marketers could be interested in.

“There’s so much to think about with Home Depot, because it's no longer a store, it's a platform,” Babcock said.