Home Depot’s revamped retail media network simplifies campaigns, expands audience, VP says

Yesterday, The Home Depot hosted its first in-person retail media marketing summit, InFronts, where it introduced its revamped retail media network, Orange Apron Media. In addition to the new name, the retail media network will expand its services to include a unified on-site/off-site platform, a data clean room solution, and new media partners.

“We wanted to understand what makes us differentiated,” said Melanie Babcock, vice president of Orange Apron Media and monetization, of the rebrand. “And it’s really about our service model and how we use service as a lens to view our products and experiences.”

What’s new: To simplify its retail media experience, The Home Depot launched Orange Access, a platform combining advertisers’ on-site and off-site campaigns.

• “With a lot of retail media networks, there’s on-site tools and then there’s off-site tools, and you have someone merging it all together,” said Babcock.
• With Orange Access, which all of The Home Depot’s advertisers will have access to by the end of the year, clients can view and manage all of their campaigns in one place.

Audience expansion: Orange Apron Media will also open to non-endemic advertisers, introduce more measurement capabilities including a data clean room solution, and add new media partners like Telemundo Univision.

“When we look at our customers, specifically millennial or Gen Z customers, they are the most diverse generation in our history,” said Babcock. “And Spanish-language audiences are becoming more and more important to our suppliers.”

By combining The Home Depot’s customer data with Univision’s audience, advertisers can scale their campaigns outside of the retail environment.

Staying on brand: The rebrand originated from a conversation Babcock had last summer, as The Home Depot took stock of the retail media landscape and tried to identify what made it different from other networks.

When thinking about who provides service within The Home Depot, it all comes down to the orange apron.

“If you’re in the call center, you wear your apron every day as a frontline associate. If you’re an associate in our stores, you’re wearing an apron. At our corporate office, we wear our aprons for all our key meetings,” said Babcock.

Out of the hundreds of names suggested during the rebrand process, Orange Apron Media kept resurfacing because of how aptly it described what the network was trying to achieve.

“Those three words were carefully chosen,” said Babcock. “It’s based on The Home Depot and the experience we have. But it also signifies where we’re going and what differentiates us in the market.”

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