Melanie Babcock, Home Depot’s vice president of Orange Apron Media and monetization, discusses the brand’s new self-service retail ad platform Orange Access.
The Home Depot unveiled a new self-service ad platform, dubbed Orange Access, to help its suppliers manage their retail media buys within its retail media network Orange Apron Media.
The new self-service platform allows advertise to adjust their media campaigns in real time, and allows suppliers to conduct their ad buys and access all of their reporting in one place for all of their Home Depot ads.
Home Depot says its retail media network allows advertisers to reach its 198 million online shoppers or the 3.5 billion consumers who visit its 2,340 stores each year. For its on-site ads, Home Depot says shoppers are 26% more likely to convert and they will spend 28% more dollars per visit when they engage with a product from an Orange Apron Media ad.
Melanie Babcock, Home Depot’s vice president of Orange Apron Media and monetization, sat down with Multichannel Marketer to talk about Orange Access and the future of retail media at Home Depot.
Multichannel Marketer: Let’s hear more about this announcement and about what is new.
Malanie Babcock: So Orange Access is the name of our platform and it is a unified advertising experience. We needed to provide an experience for our suppliers that met their needs to be able to compete effectively, to drive customers to their products while on their home improvement shopping journeys.
We have three big parts of our business, our on-site ad experience, our off-site ad experience with our various media partners and our in-store or offline ad experience, which is still growing and developing. And we needed to have a unified system that brought those together.
So up until this point, it was bifurcated. If you wanted to buy our ads on site, we had a SaaS technology, that’s what we did. And then if you wanted to buy off-site ads, to do traffic driving or awareness or branding, then you had a separate experience. And no one wants two experiences.
But unifying our own ad experience on HomeDepot.com or our owned advertising experience with an off-site experience was very difficult and something that we knew we needed to find a partner to help us build. So we went out and looked all throughout the land, found a partner in Canada that had been working with our Home Depot Canada office and found a partner through a company called Vantage who had built a similar technology, or at least the vision was going in that direction.
It’s really a one place for our suppliers to go and manage everything related to Orange Apron Media. It’s, ‘How is my business doing?’ Looking at reporting, access to audiences and the different segmentations that we have of audiences. It’s being able to understand on-site and off-site or in-store sales.
Not that we didn’t have those things, they just were either done through a manual process, like I’m going to send you an email with my report or done in a QBR or maybe you had your business data, but that was in a system that was unrelated to Orange Media. So it was there but not collected in a way that made you an agile business within the Home Depot. It was kind of layered and disparate. So this makes it unified and succinct so that they can effectively see how their media buys are driving their business and be able to respond in the moment.
MM: So it’s not that they couldn’t do it in the moment before, but it was just kind of so cumbersome to get all the information they needed to make that in-the-moment-decision?
Babcock: Correct. It just made it difficult. And to be honest with you, we’re not thinking about just our suppliers, we’re also thinking about our people because we have a lot of people that provide managed service for our suppliers or help self-serve suppliers.
MM: How long have you been working on this initiative?
Babcock: I mean, to be really honest with you, three years.
MM: Okay. Wow.
Babcock: However, we’ve gone through many iterations. One, should we build it ourselves? We always start with that. We have a huge IT organization. We’re a big company. We have a lot of resources. So we started down that path. But ad technology is a very different specialty and expertise.
In the world of retail media networks, it has accelerated faster than any other media channel in the history of media channels. Three years is a long time in the recent retail media business, but maybe not necessarily in another technology business.
So we decided to go down a build path and then we decided that we needed to actually do the build-and-partner path to accelerate where we wanted to go with our product. So that took about a year and a half of our time to come to that decision. And then we have to find a partner. And that takes time as well. So in all about three years, but I would say pen to paper and really accept operating in the current platform that we’re in has been about 18 months.
MM: It’s only been a few days since you launched this. Did you beta test this at all with any suppliers or have you gotten any feedback?
Babcock: Yes, we have. We actually did a soft announcement of this to our suppliers in the end of March when we did our brand change. And that was very well received. We have some really trusted supplier partners who we bring into all kinds of and launches throughout the career of Orange Apron Media. They’re highly invested in the success of their brand inside of Orange Apron Media, and they give us their feedback and tests with us.
MM: How big is that group?
Babcock: Of suppliers? It’s on average about eight to 10.
MM: Oh, a very small group.
Babcock: A lot of these suppliers are very sophisticated marketers. And so they are used to investing in retail media networks. They have a lot of experience and exposure to sophisticated media tools. They’re pulling off of their expertise and their own experience, not just with retail media networks, but with other media platforms to inform what they think would make our product better.
MM: Can you talk a little bit about the off-site retail media that you guys offer and how that’s unique and beneficial?
Babcock: I’m going to really credit my team. I have a really fantastic team who works very closely with our media partners. So we went out first with our Meta partners, Pinterest partners and Google partners, and said, ‘We want you to come into our platform.’ Do you know how hard that is? That’s a very tall ask of us to say, ‘We need you to come into our platform.’
They have a lot of sophisticated technology. Obviously, they have really amazing ad experiences, but we needed them to integrate back into us to bring a lot of their functionality into our system to create this unified platform. Because again, we don’t want to ask our suppliers to go into all these disparate one-off systems to manage their ad buys or even our people. If you think about that, it’s a lot of extra steps. And so those three partners really came forward and integrated and offered a lot of thought capital and willingness to link into our systems, into Orange Access, where they are now available to buy within our system versus having a supplier to go out of Orange Access.
MM: And this is attractive for suppliers because they’re using your customer data that you’ve gathered on site without cookies that they have to manage with tracking.
Babcock: That’s correct. We’re a specialty retailer, so everyone who’s in our network is a home improvement supplier of some kind, and they’re very interested in first-party audiences. And our audience data is phenomenal. And it does help our suppliers find customers who are not only in market for their products, but in market for a project.
MM: Through 2024, how has your growth been with suppliers coming onto the network and using it?
Babcock: We’ve seen a lot of growth. We’re growing in number of suppliers and in the size of our existing suppliers.
MM: When we had last talked, you said the goal is to double the number of suppliers in the next few years. Is that still the goal?
Babcock: You bet. We’re working as hard as we can on that.
MM: I know a common critique for the on-site experience of retail ads is that consumers don’t want to sift through a lot of ads. What would be your response to that?
Babcock: My response is, I think of all of our partners, our toughest partner is our head of HomeDepot.com because he and his team are very, very protective of the customer experience. And they really put us through a lot of tests and testing and learning together to make sure that we’re not constructing the customer experience, that we’re actually championing the customer experience. Because of that rigor, I don’t believe that we have an interface on our properties where the ads feel intrusive or overwhelming.
What we found with ads and how we’re managing our ads, is to really make sure that our ads are really relevant and not disruptive of that customer experience. When I look at other platforms, they may have a lot more ad units on their pages than what we do, but we’re testing and learning in that area too. Is this too many? Is this too few? We’re constantly looking at those numbers because at the end of the day, we want to make sure the customer experience is maintained.
At Home Depot, I feel very confident that our customers feel that the ads are contributing to a positive experience because of the rigor that we have with our teams internally around the test-and-learn agenda.
MM: How do you gauge that? That a customer would say, ‘This is too many ads.’ Is it a focus group?
Babcock: We definitely have focus groups, but you can just tell by their behavior. We know the average time that they spend on the site, on a page, how often they click on something. By looking at some of those benchmarks that we have around our organic listings versus the paid listings we can assess if these are intrusive. So can we take it all the way to the max? — We’ve never done that, by the way — but if we do, can we see that we’re creating a dip in our experience and time on the site, time on that page, willingness to click?
What’s really nice about the Home Depot in general is our customers come to solve a problem in their home. They’re not necessarily just kind of browsing around, they’re really educating themselves. And that makes it easier to assess if there is a disruption in the customer experience because there is easier metrics for us to look at versus maybe a different kind of platform where it’s a little bit more browsing. I always tell my team, ‘People don’t shop for vanities for fun.’ So you can see how the customer’s searching and then make those assessments. So yes, focus groups, but also their behavior on our site.
MM: Anything else you’re excited about in the retail media space?
Babcock: From an industry perspective, I think that there’s just a lot more that we’re going to do around standardization and refinement of measurement. I think we’re challenged. We’re part of that Interactive Advertising Bureau. We’re part of a lot of our partners councils like LiveRamp and Meta. We sit on a lot of boards and councils to be able to make sure that retail media is a big part of their agenda as well. That’s going to help with standardization in the market. There’s a lot to be excited about because I still think we’re in the early stages of this. And I like that new frontier feeling.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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