The Helpful Place Wants to Help Brands Find Their Customers

It is one of the quieter ironies of modern marketing that a hardware store — a place where people go to buy drill bits and caulk — now operates what is essentially a small television network, complete with an upfront presentation.

RedVest Media, the retail media arm of Ace Hardware, will hold its first formal upfront event later this week, unveiling a suite of measurement and audience-targeting capabilities that its executives hope will persuade advertisers to think of the cooperative's 4,000-plus locally owned stores as something more than places to find the right size hex wrench.

The network, which Ace introduced in 2025, has secured technical and financial partnerships with DoorDash, the delivery service; Pacvue and Epsilon, the advertising technology platforms; and In-Store Marketplace, which specializes in physical retail media. The DoorDash arrangement, announced last year, allows brands to advertise storefronts within the app, with delivery fulfilled by local Ace locations.

Among the new offerings is what the company calls closed-loop measurement — the increasingly standard retail media promise that advertisers can trace whether a customer who saw an ad subsequently bought the item, whether online or in a physical store. There are also audience segments built from Ace's own purchase data, including categories like recent home buyers and committed do-it-yourselfers.

(One imagines the latter group requires little persuasion to visit a hardware store, but perhaps that is beside the point.)

RedVest is also introducing what it calls social amplification and influencer capabilities, which will enlist "Ace-vetted creators" to help brands reach customers earlier in their consideration process. Additional features include weather-triggered programmatic advertising — so that, presumably, snow shovels can be promoted when snow is imminent — and multi-brand seasonal campaigns with pooled investment.

The audience library, Ace said, will continue to be developed throughout 2027. Some capabilities may require additional investment.

In hardware, as in advertising, nothing is ever truly turnkey.

Original story published in MediaPost: "Ace Hardware Media Arm Unveils Measurement, Audience Features"