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ATLANTA—Home Depot is taking a unique approach to retail media by prioritizing the experience of its suppliers and customers. While many retailers focus primarily on monetizing their digital shelf space, Home Depot's Vice President of Orange Apron Media and Monetization, Melanie Babcock, has emphasized the importance of the brands and manufacturers that sell products through the retailer.
Speaking to Forbes, she said that retailers often overlook the supplier experience despite brands being key stakeholders in advertising partnerships. This philosophy guided a major technology overhaul last year and shaped the company’s approach to advertising, from user interfaces to measurement standards.
“Often the retailer thinks all about the (end) customer and customer experience,” Babcock says. “But the supplier experience isn't necessarily top of mind. Yet they're the ones engaging with the retailer as well.”
Babcock, who started Home Depot’s retail media efforts in 2018, initially saw an opportunity to increase her social media budget by helping suppliers retarget customers who had abandoned their product pages. “I wondered if our suppliers would pay to retarget customers who had abandoned their product pages,” Babcock recalls.
Starting with ten suppliers, she created a portal for brands to connect with customers who viewed but didn't purchase products. “By goodness, they were like, this works,” she says, and what began as a small-scale initiative gained support from the company's leadership, including CEO Ted Decker and evolved into Orange Apron Media, one of retail’s most advanced media networks.
Unlike other retailers that rely on third-party ad tech, Home Depot has invested heavily in owning its technology stack. The company acquired technology from Pentaleap to improve its retail media capabilities and enhance the ad experience for suppliers. As Forbes notes, this move gives Home Depot greater control over customization and optimization.
“We decided we needed to own the majority of our tech stack because it would be then designed to meet the standards of service expectations that we have from our suppliers. I'm going to put it in the top five things that we did for our retail media network,” Babcock said.
Additionally, Home Depot has integrated its onsite and offsite ad capabilities into a unified platform called Orange Access. This approach allows advertisers to manage campaigns across multiple channels in one place—something that few retail media networks offer.
