Lowe’s Media Network has a handful of new partnerships and expanded capabilities intended to drive effectiveness for brand advertisers and provide a point of differentiation in the commerce media space, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
The home improvement retailer’s media network is expanding beyond its owned platforms — including onsite and offsite media — to Roku, DoorDash, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube. Overall, the media partners can help brands reach consumers at different parts of the consideration journey. For example, Roku helps advertisers using Lowe’s Media Network to engage streaming audiences at the top of the funnel.
“More and more, what's important in retail media is that we're moving beyond media placements and media metrics and to something that is a full-brand experience for our customers,” said Elyse Blouin, vice president and general manager of Lowe’s Media Network.
Lowe’s Media Network, which was first launched in 2021, is also partnering with consulting firm Ipsos to provide independent incrementality measurement, including bespoke marketing mix modeling and agile attribution, for brand partners. The move helps meet the measurement mandate that has surrounded retail media for years.
“Coming from the media buy-side myself, I feel like I uniquely understand what I would expect as a media buyer, and what I would expect is true incrementality,” said Blouin, who previously oversaw owned media strategy and investment for the retailer.
The media network claims to be among the first from a retailer to provide incremental return on ad spend reporting to top spenders. The partnership with Ipsos speaks to advertiser demands for accredited third-party measurement at a time when companies like Meta, Google and Amazon are often the arbiters of campaign success on their platforms.
“I don't want an advertiser grading their own work and saying, ‘Just trust me, our model is great.’ I want to make sure that we're leveraging a third party that has credibility in the space,” Blouin said.
LLMs, creative and more
With retail media revenue in the U.S. predicted by WARC to reach $100 billion by next year, Lowe’s Media Network hopes that its latest moves will encourage advertisers to see it as a full agency partner — not just a media network, Blouin said. To that end, the platform is expanding support of ad creative in a number of channels, including static, video, social-first and in-store.
“We've heard a lot over the years about how vendors would like to do more with us, but they may not have the creative throughput that's needed in order to activate on some of the channels that we're able to activate, so we've brought creative over into our team in order to meet some of that demand,” Blouin explained.
In addition to new media partnerships and measurement features, Lowe’s Media Network is launching an answer engine optimization product that looks to help advertisers rank higher within LLMs and other AI-powered language processing platforms that are changing how consumers discover, research and buy products. The media network’s Reddit integration also speaks to this need, as the social network has served as a top source of artificial intelligence citations.
With additions and improvements to full-funnel media, measurement, creative support and AI tools, Lowe’s Media Network is stepping up to better compete not just in home improvement retail, but in commerce media at large. Its latest moves position the offering for both endemic and nonendemic advertisers, due in part to the data at its core.
“We have a tremendous amount of data on both homeowners and pro customers, which is unique in our industry,” Blouin said. “Both of those audiences have very different signals.”
