Ace Hardware unveils its Retail Media Network, RedVest Media, which will launch in October.
Ace Hardware is the latest merchant to open its website and stores to brand advertising.
The hardware co-op with 5,000-plus stores will allow brands to advertise to shoppers on its homepage, product detail pages, search pages, in app, within emails and in-store signs, in addition to off-site ads with programmatic display, video, CTV and mobile ads. Ace has 73 million loyalty program members, 6 million app users, 50 million monthly website visits and 3,900 stores opted-in to in-store signs, said Molly Hjelm, Corporate Vice President, RedVest Media at Ace Hardware.
What’s more Ace’s ecommerce sales are growing 30% year over year. The retail media network, dubbed RedVest Media, will empower individual brands to promote their portfolio of products to Ace’s growing audience, Hjelm said.
“As a co-op retailer, we’re a company that really values marketing as one of the core benefits that we provide to our independent stores,” Hjelm said. “We know that it works. We know that it drives sales, that it drives units, that it drives visits into those retailers. And so putting those same tools in the hands of our vendor community really feels like just an extension of that helpfulness.”
Ace is ‘wonderfully late’ to building its retail media network
Over the past handful of years retailers have woken up to the added revenue stream a retail media network can add to their bottom line. (Amazon.com generated $56 billion in advertising services in 2024, according to its fiscal reporting.) And subsequently, retailers have steadily debuted their own networks including major players like Target, Walmart, The Home Depot, Dollar General, Wayfair, BestBuy, HyVee, Lowe’s and now Ace Hardware.
Hjelm describes the timing of RedVest Media as “wonderfully late.”
“We are coming forward at a time where the industry has learned a lot. It has matured significantly,” she said. “The tech stack and the partnerships that are possible in retail media have evolved really significantly over the last four or five years. And so that’s allowing us to launch really quickly a mature portfolio and to learn from some of the pitfalls or the things that have slowed growth and development of some of the other leading networks.”
For example, instead of trying to build its own platform in-house, from the jump it tapped Epsilon Retail Media to build the platform using its proven user interface for media buying and measurement.
Because other merchants have also used Epsilon to build their network, brands are familiar with it and the learning curve for using RedVest Media should be low, Hjelm said.
“The retailer brings the value of their shopper as an audience, their sales data for measurement and their inventory, their onsite inventory, which is exclusive to them, and intercepts people right at that point of sale,” she said. “But no advertiser wants a retailer build the UI/UX that the media runs through.”
Brands want to advertise at Ace
Another advantage of coming “late” to the retail media game is not having to convince brands of the value of buying retail media ads.
“The vast majority of these partners are engaged in retail media at other retailers, and so they’ve seen the power of it firsthand to drive their sales,” Hjelm said.
Previously, brands Ace featured in its advertisements were at the marketing team’s discretion. And while that was free marketing, thousands of brands sell at Ace that it may never feature in an ad, Hjelm said. Media buying opportunities give all brands more control and precision for how their products show up.
“Think about the difference for a grilling company of being featured in a grilling ad alongside all their competitive set on the week that isn’t necessarily their most important week of the year, versus the ability to have an ad that only features their brand, their promotion, and to guarantee that it gets the homepage slot in their most important seasonal week of the year,” Hjelm said.
For Ace, the goal for the additional ads will be to drive more sales and for Ace to increase its share of voice especially in the four categories of power, paint, home preservation and lawn & garden, Hjelm said.
It took about five months to build, although Ace has thought of having a retail media network for years. Hjelm declined to share any return on ad spend benchmarks for retail media advertisers.
Shoppers see on-site ads regularly
Because more retailers have opened their websites to advertising, shoppers now regularly see sponsored products while they shop. Hjelm said ads enhance the online shopping experience because they are personalized and introduce shoppers to other products they may not have considered.
“We don’t always expect that an Ace customer knows exactly what they want when they walk into an Ace store. And it’s the same thing online,” Hjelm said. “You might come online thinking that you want a certain type of drill or that you’re looking for a certain sort of solution. And to have the opportunity to see relevant and adjacent categories and products helps you. It actually allows us to be more helpful to that customer.”
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