"Late By Design" - Molly Hjelm from Ace Hardware's RedVest Media Shares her Retail Media Gameplan

Molly Hjelm - Ace
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: I first met Molly Gelm at the RMN Ascendant Event in Silicon Valley where she joined Austin Leonard from Dollar General Media Network and myself on a panel about career paths in retail media year. And [00:00:15] as I moderated this session with Austin and Molly, what struck me about Molly immediately ~was her candor, was her candor and approachability was her candor.~

[00:00:21] ~And, uh. ~Was her candor and approachability combined with a killer instinct for data and timing. As she said in other [00:00:30] interviews, ACE Hardware is wonderfully late to retail media, but that's by design. She's watched everyone else make mistakes, and now she's ready to pounce. Here are some key themes from my [00:00:45] conversation with Molly that didn't make it into my full profile piece for the drum, which you should check out. I'll link up to it in the show notes, but for now, I'm gonna share a few of my notes from my interview with Molly Gelm from Ace Hardware's Red Vest [00:01:00] Media.

[00:01:00]

[00:01:01] Kiri Masters: ~The big theme from our conversation was that retail media should be a part of.~

[00:01:01] ~The, ~the number one theme from our conversation is that retail media should show up in the merchant's p and l. Now, a lot of retail media networks talk about not being tax to advertisers. Molly's talking about something [00:01:15] different. She's making the case internally. That retail media should be a tool that helps merchants to hit their KPIs.

[00:01:22] Instead of merchants seeing retail media as competing for vendor dollars or trade marketing spend, [00:01:30] what if they see it as marketing that helps to solve problems that price promotions can't fix? So she talks about a few examples here. If there's a new product sitting on the shelf that's not hitting trial targets.

[00:01:44] Well, [00:01:45] media can drive awareness to the right customer segments. What if a merchant is facing tough year over year? Comps? Well, a coordinated media burst can shore up those numbers. And what about if you need [00:02:00] category growth and not just share shifting? Well, national media can drive incremental foot traffic.

[00:02:07] The key here is showing that this actually. Works, and this is where Molly's Deep Data [00:02:15] background comes in handy. She's built reporting that shows the merchants both the macro impact that is the total sales driven by retail media year to date for their department, and the micro wins of individual campaign results.

[00:02:29] And so [00:02:30] when merchants can see incremental sales showing up in their numbers, the conversation shifts from you're cluttering up my site with ads to here's a challenge that we can solve together.

[00:02:42] Highlight number two from my conversation is that [00:02:45] Ace went all in with tech partner Epsilon and then not hiding it. I've talked a lot in the past about how a lot of retailers hide their tech stack for various reasons.

[00:02:57] Very interesting to dig [00:03:00] into. Molly's approach is a little bit different. She says that they partnered with Epsilon for their entire platform, onsite, offsite, and in store. And her reasoning here is that advertisers are tired at this point and leery of [00:03:15] retailers building their own technology and building highly customized measurement within their walls.

[00:03:21] And so the idea here is keep it simple. ~Keep it,~

[00:03:24] ~deliver a system that ~deliver a system that has a mature portfolio with existing [00:03:30] workflows. No proprietary portals, no retailer grading its own homework. ~So, uh.~

[00:03:36] ~I find, so ~I find this quite refreshing. Molly acknowledges, there's retailers that have invested a lot in data science teams, CDPs, publisher [00:03:45] relationships. They might need different approaches, but for ACE hardware, starting with a blank slate, the all in one solution made a ton of sense for them. Did you know [00:04:00] that leading retail media networks drive 85% of their ads through mid and long tail advertisers?

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[00:04:39] Kiri Masters: Highlight number three from my conversation. In-store media is starting with [00:04:45] print, so despite all the hype around digital screens and programmatic in-store retail media, red vest media is launching with printed shelf signage and she said in our conversation, everything old is new. Again, we're not [00:05:00] breaking any molds here, but this is what's interesting.

[00:05:04] Ace Hardware has a co-op structure, so thousands of independent store operators who have been operating their own stores for years and years, they have kind [00:05:15] of, been jamming with their own audio systems and setting up TV screens to demonstrate products. So there's these, she calls it these microcosms of testing that's already happening, [00:05:30] and that's kind of great to walk into and hear firsthand what their experiences are, what is already working, and maybe what Red Vest can support with.

[00:05:42] So this is a interesting approach [00:05:45] to look at because there's a few different benefits here. . One, there's not the enormous CapEx required to install a whole lot of screens across a whole lot of stores. Number two, ACE can learn from what's happening in individual stores and [00:06:00] scale selectively,

[00:06:01] and they can do it at their own pace.

[00:06:03] And highlight number four, the toxic dynamic of unrealistic growth projections. Wow. I'm so happy that Molly opened up about this. It's something that I think a lot of people in the industry can relate [00:06:15] to. She shared how there seems to be a lot of situations where unrealistic growth projections created toxic environments,

[00:06:24] and here's one of her quotes. You can be growing a healthy business, doing the right thing by partners and [00:06:30] have an executive team or a merchant team looking at it like it's a failing business because it's not hitting expectations that weren't realistic to begin with. And she told me that when she evaluated the opportunity to join Ace and Head [00:06:45] Up Red Verse Media, her number one question was, what are the company's expectations for year one?

[00:06:51] And the response she got was, you come in and you tell us. And so that breathing room that she got changes [00:07:00] everything, and it's the difference between. Building partnerships that drive advertising growth versus quarterly fire sales and growing a healthy business versus chasing unrealistic targets.

[00:07:12] ~I.~

[00:07:12] ~Wrapping up here. Wrapping up here with. ~Wrapping up here with something that Molly kept [00:07:15] coming back to. It's that retail media should be a precision tool to solve business pain points using data, not a tax, not a revenue extraction machine. A tool that shows up in the merchant's p and l because it drives [00:07:30] incremental sales.

[00:07:31] And one final quote from Molly, advertisers can feel if there's a lot of pressure internally to grow at all costs. Versus the breathing room to grow at a good pace and do the right thing by your partners. I love [00:07:45] it. Thanks, Molly, for the time. And

[00:07:48] if you wanna dig in a little bit more to Red Vest Media and Molly's POV, check out my full profile on the drum. I'll link up to it in the show notes. Catch you tomorrow.

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