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Ace Hardware Retail Media Launch & Strategy
00:23:49
Ace Hardware Corporate VP Molly Hjelm breaks down how RedVest Media leverages late-mover advantage, seamless Pacvue tech integration, and real-time transaction data to build a high-ROI retail media network across 5,200 store locations.
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- [00:01]
A
What I think sets retail media networks apart and there's some interesting research from eMarketer and from SMG on this topic that's emerged recently. What sets retail media networks apart in this day and age is how seamless they are to transact on. And so this partnership with pacview allows our inventory and our campaigns to be managed in the same platform that sophisticated advertisers are using to optimize other more mature media networks. And so it just gives us that ability to connect with in with them wherever they are.
- [00:31]
B
This episode is brought to you by Creator TV by sabio Creator Led Entertainment is moving from the feed to the TV and Creator TV is leading the shift with free streaming channels, original series, on demand programming and live creator sports. For brands, that means new ways to reach passionate audiences through culturally relevant entertainment. From high impact CTV media and integrations to event sponsorships, creating Creator live TV spots and social extensions. Bring your brand into the creator led tv era. @creatortv.com this week on Next in Media, I chatted with Malo Jelam, Corporate Vice President and head of Redvest Media, Ace Hardware's retail advertising division, about what the hardware brand's late start in retail media means, whether that can be an advantage given its co op model. Molly and I also talked about how ACE looks at attribution differently than other networks due to its many high ticket items and whether it's a must to go off platform these days in retail media. Let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to Next to Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Molly Jump. She is the Corporate VP for Redvest Media and the head of Retail media for Ace Hardware. Molly, did I get your name and title right?
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A
You crushed it. Thank you.
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B
All right, I feel good. Thanks for being here. Excited to talk to you. Super interesting time in for your company in this category in the space, but I think it's probably good just to start from the top like give us a little bit about your role in and I think Ace is pretty relatively new to the retail media craze. So maybe give us the state of affairs for you and the company.
- [01:52]
A
Yep, that's right Mike. We are new to retail media. We launched our retail media Network in Q4 of 2025. So very new to the scene and I was brought on my role you mentioned. I'm head of Retail media here at ace. I was brought on really to build the case study and assess the viability and launch our retail media network here at ace. Having done that and had experience at other Mature retail media networks prior to this. What's unique about ACE coming in and assessing the opportunity here is that we were huge. We've got 5200 stores presence across all 50 states. So we've got that geographical presence and that scale. 75% of Americans live within five miles of the nace and about half live within three miles.
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B
It's a pretty great footprint.
- [02:43]
A
We were really convenient. But the real unique aspect of ACE is that we are a co op retailer. So we've got over 2, 800 independent store owners that are responsible for ACE locations. Yeah, yeah. Really unique. And so as you think about launching anything within a co op ecosystem where independent store owners have a ton of autonomy over what of the corporate playbook they apply and what they don't apply, there's a lot of nuance there.
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B
You would think it's. I always, I have many conversations with people who started retail media businesses and I would think doing it now versus five years ago, that should be easier. You learned, you know, all the should we build, should we buy? But it's probably a little different with it, with a co op arrangement. Is it easy to do it now or not necessarily.
- [03:35]
A
So there are two dynamics in that question. I think there's the one dynamic of ACE is coming to this late in the game. Why is ACE coming late to the game? And part of that is the. Our leadership had a lot of wanted to build this with a lot of intention and they wanted to make sure there were a lot of retail media networks being stood up. They wanted to make sure there was longevity to this space. They wanted to make sure that there was true value there for our vendor community and that we're being good stewards and that it was a value for a retail community before we put effort behind it. And that took some time to prove out. At the same time, ACE was scaling its E commerce ecosystem and so making E commerce available and you know, all the pipes that are required there with store level, item level, inventory that could differ wildly by store and location in this type of environment. So there was a ramp up there. And the launch of this media network kind of beautifully corresponds to our launch of last mile fulfillment, partnership and delivery. So that E commerce here at ACE is not only pick up from store and ship to home, but it also, we have the ability to deliver straight to your door from a store through our partnerships with DoorDash and Uber Eats and Instacart.
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B
So I would think, I would think your co op partners or if they're bought into that and they're seeing business growth. That's probably a good time to do all the things at the same time.
- [05:01]
A
Exactly. So we've got this huge behemoth now, e commerce ecosystem with a lot of different fulfillment modalities available. And then it makes a lot more sense to launch a retail media network when you've got transactable media in a transactable ecosystem. The second part of your question was really around being a latecomer to retail media and does that make things easier? And I would argue when initially assessing the build having come from some of the other more mature players, what I observed in those ecosystems and help build those ecosystems was it's a slog to build a retail media network. Or it was in those, in those early days as you were trying to figure out the right tech stack and you were trying to build and bring in partnerships and create new pathways to meet customers where they were spending their time and attention. Now it's a lot easier to connect the pipes and there's a lot more efficiency available. So I really talk about us having a late mover advantage in a lot of ways. We've got advantages in what we know to perceive for desires of vendors, for measurement. We've got kind of a seamless mature portfolio and we've designed this in partnership with merchandising. And so those three things, we really knew we had to build around those because we've seen others now orienting their portfolios towards those things.
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B
Right. So it's like I guess that the tech landscape is more mature. Then you also know like what you gotta build versus trying to figure it out on the fly. So those things are all probably dovetail a little bit, a little bit easier.
- [06:41]
A
Yeah, well said. And I spent my time shoulder to shoulder with CPG advertisers for the better part of a decade as a sales leader. And so in doing that had the opportunity to hear firsthand what they, what they wanted to see from those retail media networks and what we were solving for for them. And so this opportunity come in and build for Ace an ecosystem that has the scale and that has the E commerce platform and the modalities to fulfill to be able to build from ground zero what for what they wanted was really an exciting opportunity.
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B
So yeah, I would think that you probably have some credibility that just like if, if you were just an ad person coming in to try and stand this up would be a little different. Tell me about. Okay, so you, you recently signed a interesting deal with Packview which I, I think, you know, I first came to know packview was like an Amazon specialist, but they're really working with almost every retailer. So tell me a little bit about that partnership.
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A
Yeah, this is huge for us and it's part of we, we launched, I want to say, a mature portfolio. We launched at parity with some of the mature players in the portfolio that we launched with, which is off site, on site and in store we launched with.
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B
All of those are usually step by
- [07:58]
A
step, not together, step by step. So we launched at par and we've got the scale. But what I think sets retail media networks apart, and there's some interesting research from eMarketer and from SMG on this topic that's emerged recently, what sets retail media networks apart in this day and age is how seamless they are to transact on. And so this partnership with pacview allows our inventory and our campaigns to be managed in the same platform that sophisticated advertisers are using to optimize other more mature media networks.
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B
You don't want to come in and be different or have it, you know, dictating a new set of buying terms or something.
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A
Exactly, exactly. And so it just gives us that ability to connect with, in with them
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B
wherever they are, talk, tell people where you were. You were a couple different stops. You said, like you're in building mode the last couple years. How do like maybe the different places you were at compare. I know it's still pretty early for ace. And then how has the space evolved? Like, what have you seen?
- [08:55]
A
Yeah, prior to this, I was at a large dollar retailer and prior to that spent four years leading a sales organization for a leading grocery retail media network. And so in some senses, you know, every retailer is going to have their nuance. They're all running the same foundational playbook as far as the ability to connect brands to their customer. And to some extent, the foundational inventory ends up being pretty much the same. But there's so much underlying nuance when it comes to the purchase behaviors. The data in dollar in grocery, the turn and consumable nature of the majority of the products that are being sold in store means that you can really observe and react to customer behavior and see the fruits of your labor really quickly. You're also working with extremely thin margins. And so you've got these highly sophisticated brand marketers that you're working shoulder to shoulder with who have a lot of pressure on every dollar that they're spending. And so that really is a forcing function on what makes sense, what makes the cut and what doesn't. And so I'M really grateful for that as the school that I went to essentially in retail media and for the ability to bring that same lens here into hardware where again, we've kind of built this network at maturity. It had to be measurable from day one. It had to have real time measurement associated because I knew even if our endemic community wasn't asking for that day one, minute one, that's the gold standard. That's what the sophisticated marketers are going to expect. That's where we would mature into and so had to be able to provide it now.
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B
Yeah, everyone's expectations are higher at this point, so that makes sense.
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A
Exactly.
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B
I'm going to assume that you, you know, everybody in retail media sort of starts with their endemic core, their existing customers, and then they try and build upon that. I'm guessing you're starting with the hardware category in a big way and then trying to build upon that or what does it look like at launch?
- [10:59]
A
Absolutely correct. We're really focused on building a network that's helpful for our endemic vendor community. We want to help them connect to our customer in a different way. We want to help them give them a toolkit to grow their business at Ace. We want them to be able to sit side by side with their merchants and be able to show demonstrably how they have leaned in to drive their sales for the category and the difference that it's making. And in our early days, again, we're talking about some of these differences between channels. I've been surprised to see how strongly those results are observable at a market level, not just at a campaign level. And so there is a really strong story for some of these vendors to be able to share back with their merchants.
- [11:44]
B
Because I would just think, like you mentioned, it's. You're imagining a lot of the products have longer buying cycles, so you might not get that immediate data and feedback, but you are able to see some fruits of your labor right off the bat.
- [11:57]
A
Yeah, well, and we've got bigger ticket items here, so actually the returns are spectacular. You're not seeing as high a percentage of customers convert as you might on a.
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B
If I buy a new snowblower or something. I don't know why I'm saying that in July, but yeah, that's a big, That's a big, big ticket deal.
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A
Yeah. And if you, especially if you're on dealer, you have a promotion and you're a big ticket item like a grill or power tools, and you can put that information right in the hands of an ACE customer, then in the weeks that follow, observe whether or not they take action on that. We're seeing some huge impact as a result of just being able to drive that awareness with our customer, both to E commerce sales and in store sales, which is big, but we are. So our focus is endemic. It has to be helpful, it has to make sense, it has to drive the business for endemic. And at the same time there will be instances where this will be valuable to non endemic. And we've had a number reach out to us wanting to test in our very early days. And so we're in the process of figuring out what does, what does helpful mean to non endemics when it comes to the audiences that we can provide, the placements and inventory that they might be interested in and how they might want to engage our customer. Like say new movers, for example, or pro audiences or those that take very fastidious care of their homes. Those are all, you know, potential audiences that we are hearing that insurance companies and financial institutions are interested in and
- [13:21]
B
we're working on that actually makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's take a quick break. I'm here with Charlie Abara. He's the co founder, head of content at Creator tv. So Charlie, what is Creator Ad Spot and why is it an important evolution of the traditional television commercial?
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C
Creator Ad Spot is a creator led approach to television advertising. Traditionally, when creators appear in TV commercials, they're often simply cast as a talent. With Creator adspot, they become creative partners, helping develop, produce and star in the work that allows brands to combine the reach and impact of streaming television with the authenticity and deep audience resonance creators bring.
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B
So what does Creator Ad Spot unlock for brands and what makes Creator TV uniquely positioned to deliver it for brands?
- [14:03]
C
It unlocks advertising that feels more culturally relevant, relatable and native to how audiences consume content today. Each campaign can also extend beyond ctv. Through a companion social post from the creator, Creator TV brings together deep creator relationships, television production expertise and Savio's advanced CTV audience targeting technology, allowing us to pair the right creator and message with the right audience.
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B
Terrific. Thanks, Charlie. I was also. I think it's interesting that you starting with In Store right off the bat. I don't want to make In Store in some form has been around for a long, long time, but it's almost like a newer frontier in retail media and you're seeing so much more of the big retailers like Walmart throwing screens up everywhere and building almost like a new mass medium. Why? What's the state of In Store right now? What made you Guys start there as well.
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A
Yeah, it's one of those frontiers. Like you said, everything old is new again. But also it was such an unlooked at and neglected frontier for retail media in that boom post Covid of E commerce behavior and everybody shop outside again, right? Yeah, yeah. Everybody trying to grow e commerce penetration. There was a lot of KPI, a lot of focus. And then of course it was a lot easier to have inventory on site. And so now time and attention and energy is turning towards in store for us, for ace. Our heritage, what we're known for, is that in store brick and mortar service experience that you have when you walk into an ACE store. Vast majority of our transactions happen in store. And so it just made sense that if you want to be able to activate a full funnel campaign at ACE Hardware, we needed to also offer the ability for it to flow through into the store that's in store signage, it's paper signage that our retailers opt into each month. But we are absolutely on our near term roadmap exploring other digital elements in
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B
store when it comes to this category. It's hard to paint with a single brush. But like you often hear, some brands are fully integrating retail media into their main advertising output and the data is everything's going to be together. Others are totally treating it as its own thing or in stores, its own thing, but not retail media. Like where are, where are things in the industry from what you've seen? Like in terms of the brands organizing, organizing their budgets and measurement data and all those things.
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A
It's a good question for me. It's a, it's yes and yes, we need standardization. There's no doubt about that, that they're in order for us to speak a common language, in order for marketers to be able to advocate for the investment that they need and understand how their investments are performing, there's kind of a minimum viable need for standardization. And at ace we've made a nod to that in our earliest days by launching was our measurement on Citrus Ad. It's not. There is no single gold standard for measurement. But at least being on Citrus Ad, which is somewhere that a lot of sophisticated advertisers are already in and familiar with, they're producing our measurement and, and they're MRC accredited. So it's third party supplied, MRC accredited. So there's like there's a nod to and a desire to lean into standardization there while also recognizing that, you know, some of the legacy ways that people are trying to standardize like MMM is not built for retail media. Is not a way, it's not a good way right now to measure retail media and that every retailer has fundamentally different data and different purchase cycles that make it really challenging, even with shared definitions to be able to perfectly marry up.
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B
Right. So it's, yeah, we're, we're, we're, it's far from. Everything is going to work exactly the same across category and retailer just doesn't make sense right now or maybe maybe never. What do you think? You know, there's always this, oh, there's so many retail media networks. How are we going to live this way? How are brands going to deal with this? Are they all going to come together? There's really been no sign of that other than, you know, like aggregators, I guess. Do you, do you see any, any efforts towards consolidation or you hear like a theoretically, like what if a home retailer partnered with a furniture retailer and they sold together or somebody. What do you think of those concepts or ideas?
- [18:27]
A
I think it's super smart. I think that we can't tolerate, you know, hundreds more retail media networks and expect that some of the largest, say CPG brands that span all of those different retailers in some way, shape or form are going to be able to activate strategy and focus time and effort within each one of those retail media networks. The ones that will kind of make it in this environment are the ones that have the scale, the geographical scale, that have the E commerce scale and reach, that have, you know, the best data on their customers. ACE has loyalty data, which is the gold standard as a longitudinal tracking mechanism. But there are a lot of players out there that maybe they have good data, but they're highly regional or they've got just a few hundred stores. And so in those instances, it makes too much sense for them to join forces and consolidate into something that's easier for advertisers to activate and it just helps strengthen the power of their offering.
- [19:27]
B
Makes sense. What about, you know, you mentioned starting out like a parody with everybody are looking to do that. Everybody. So many, so many retail media companies have started out with, you know, quote unquote on site. Really they're academic advertisers with ads on their sites and apps. Right. And then eventually you want to go to the open web or off platform, even ctv. Where are you in that? I mean, you're just getting out off the ground. Is that hard to get going? And do you treat those things differently than pure performance vehicles?
- [19:56]
A
I see why retail media networks are moving in that direction. And I've worked for retail media networks that made really big inroads in sharing their audiences out and kind of tapping into green budgets that way. I have a controversial opinion on this which is that, you know, I think retail media needs to re embrace retail in retail media. That for a long time we've been attempting to be media companies are really trying to position ourselves as media companies that pushing your data unfettered into other environments really divorces your audiences of the meaningful context of how you can grow a business within that retailer. It's devoid of kind of the partnership context.
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B
Interesting.
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A
And the planning and the efforts in the full funnel, you really lose that closed loop measurement from the retailer's measurement and the merchandising connectivity. So for non endemics that's the path forward. You share your audiences with them and make them available. But for endemics, I haven't seen that pushing audiences into other ecosystems and allowing them to engage self serving serve has led to stronger, more customer led outcomes or, or partnerships.
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B
It seems like you, at least you read it's led to some frustration among brands who are expecting everything to work the same in every channel and it just doesn't.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So it's not a never for us, but I would say we're thinking intentionally about how and where and in what instances and with what underpinnings we are thinking about audience extension like that.
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B
I don't know if this is your realm, so tell me, let me know if I'm going the wrong direction, but there's a lot of enthusiasm around bringing together retail media with everything shoppable now. Right. And with creators, but I don't know if that's. Are those like completely two different disciplines in your world where that's, that really belongs to social influencer budgets and strategies versus trying to bring what you're doing together with. You know, there are a lot, there are tons of YouTubers for example, who are all about home improvement. But I don't know if that's. That they belong in your universe.
- [22:08]
A
I see them absolutely converging in a relevant way. And thank goodness because I think that customers are really embracing influencer and creator content as authentic content by comparison to display ads and other formats that we've had for some time. So between video and then a trusted voice recommending something. So we're actively working to figure out, you know, how can we lean further into that capability and make it available for our partners. Right now we're doing social amplification essentially which allows our partners to take existing high performing creator content that they have the license to use and they are able to push it through our pipes in order to make sure that it's targeted to ace customers and it's measurable. And that's just a small nod to the more effective creative and the different formats there. But allowing it to benefit from retail media's precision and accountability on the back end, yeah, that's also pushing our exploration further.
- [23:20]
B
And influencer, I was going to say it seems like a monster opportunity, so that's a fascinating one to watch.
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A
Yep, I agree.
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B
Well, awesome. There's a million other other angles here we could talk about, but my awesome conversation, let's do this again sometime. And congrats on the the relatively new launch here.
- [23:33]
A
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Mike.
- [23:35]
B
Thank you. Thanks again to my guest this week, aces Malij Elm and my partners at sabio. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more with nexty Media. Thanks for listening.