Last week, Ace Hardware held its annual Ace Rewards Day sales event, designed to capture the surge in shopping activity that Amazon's Prime Day helps create each summer. The preparation behind the event offers a playbook retail media leaders can apply to major retail moments throughout the rest of the year, including the holiday season.

"There's an elasticity to customer decisioning that's happening in advance of that moment," said Molly Hjelm, corporate vice president and head of retail media at Ace Hardware's media network, Red Vest Media. "If we have pre-sale deals or first-look deals available and we're messaging to customers well in advance of the deal days themselves, we're seeing increased customer behavior and increased purchase activity."

Red Vest Media has learned that major retail events can't be treated as standalone sales days. Instead, the network approaches them as extended campaigns, building awareness weeks in advance through early messaging, first-look offers, and pre-sale opportunities designed to influence shoppers before they are ready to buy.

That approach may prove especially valuable as retail media networks (RMNs) head into a crowded second half of the year. Shoppers are increasingly researching purchases earlier, moving fluidly between channels, and concentrating decision-making into short windows around major sales events.

"You're having this opportunity to intercept customers as they're going in and out of research and decisioning," Hjelm said, noting that large language models (LLMs) are increasingly influencing the discovery phase, with shoppers using AI tools to surface deals and compare options before ever reaching a retailer's site.

To address this shift, Red Vest Media is encouraging vendors to deploy full-funnel advertising strategies, enabling them to reach customers whether they're landing directly on product pages from search or still in consideration mode through off-site media, audio on Spotify, or podcasts.

AI is reshaping product discovery, but in-store expertise still matters

Red Vest Media is preparing for what Hjelm calls "a more heavily agentic-led commerce future" by working with major AI companies to ensure products are discoverable and data is properly structured for AI-powered searches.

However, actual purchases through AI agents remain a small fraction of sales. The more significant shift is in how customers research projects.

"People are moving from more of a product-specific search path to project-specific search and research," she explained, citing her own experience using LLMs to learn how to install a sauna heater.

For home improvement retailers in particular, that shift may actually elevate the importance of the physical store. Customers can arrive with more information gathered through AI tools, but they often still want reassurance, troubleshooting help, or project-specific guidance before making a purchase.

In that environment, store associates become a critical bridge between digital research and purchase decisions, helping shoppers validate what they've learned online and apply it to their specific project needs.

To strengthen this advantage, Ace recently launched an AI initiative called Arma to equip store associates with tools that help them access inventory information, answer questions more easily, and tap into a broader repository of project knowledge. The goal is ensuring every employee, regardless of experience level, can provide expert assistance.

Retail media success still depends on retail fundamentals

Ace Hardware's cooperative structure adds an additional layer of complexity to major retail events. Unlike centralized retailers, Ace must align corporate planning with execution across its independently owned stores.

"It's a two-step model, and so we can have a vision that we're setting or enablement that we're pulling together from a corporate standpoint, but retailers need to fully support it in each individual store," Hjelm said.

That means preparing for events like Ace Rewards Day involves far more than marketing and media activation. Store operators must ensure inventory is available, point-of-sale systems are functioning properly, and inventory data remains accurate enough to support both ecommerce demand and store fulfillment.

The challenge underscores a broader reality for RMNs: Advertising can drive demand, but capturing that demand requires operational alignment across the organization. The effectiveness of a retail media strategy depends as much on store-level execution as it does on audience targeting or campaign performance.

This was originally featured in the Commerce Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.