The Drum’s commerce media columnist Kiri Masters sits down with Molly Hjelm, the new head of Red Vest Media, who’s building Ace Hardware’s retail media network with an unusual philosophy: media should solve merchant problems, not create them.
Most retail media networks eventually face the same existential tension: merchants who see ads as clutter on their carefully curated site, and media teams under pressure to hit quarterly growth targets by any means necessary. Molly Hjelm is betting she can avoid that trap entirely.
As corporate vice-president, head of retail media at Ace Hardware (named Red Vest Media), Hjelm has a disarmingly simple thesis: retail media isn’t a tax on brands or a revenue extraction machine. It’s marketing that should show up in the merchant’s P&L. A merchant is incentivized to grow a category and from there, Hjelm argues that Ace’s vendors (the sales teams who are KPI’d on growing their business at Ace) have “a fiduciary responsibility” to advocate for national and offsite media dollars that drive shoppers to Ace stores – and to prove the incremental sales that follow.
Plenty of retail media leaders claim their networks aren’t a tax. But most are talking to advertisers, making the case that retail media provides incremental value rather than extracting margin. Hjelm is making a different argument – one directed at her own merchant organization. She’s reframing retail media not as a parallel ad business that competes with merchandising for vendor dollars, but as a precision tool that helps merchants hit their own KPIs.
That framing turns the traditional retail media dynamic on its head. Rather than merchants and media teams operating in siloed – or worse, adversarial– orbits, Hjelm is designing a system where retail media success is defined by merchant success.
The organizational design at Ace Hardware enables this. Hjelm reports through Ace’s chief marketing officer, who championed the retail media business case to the CEO. The structure itself matters less than having C-suite allies who understand the vision, she says. What’s non-negotiable is “shoulder to shoulder and highly transparent real-time communication” with merchants – not the org chart lines, but the daily collaboration that makes retail media a tool merchants actually want to use.
“There’s this sense that merchandisers have controlled the puts and trades with vendors (brands) for decades,” Hjelm tells me. “This idea that there’s another entity engaging with vendors where money is related creates a lot of fear. But retail media is marketing. It’s resulting in foot traffic, in sales, in visits, in awareness that those trade dollars aren’t driving.”
Part of what makes Hjelm’s approach necessary is that hardware exists in a different universe than categories like grocery when it comes to retail media sophistication. Many brands selling through Ace don’t even realize they have separate budget buckets beyond traditional trade marketing.
“My stakeholders [brand suppliers] right now think they have one bucket of money,” Hjelm explains. “They’re not accustomed to advocating for national dollars or e-commerce dollars. Sometimes, unbeknownst to them, those budgets exist within their organization.“
Her pitch to brands is pragmatic: if your KPI is growing your business at Ace, then you need to advocate for national investments to reach Ace customers offsite and drive them to Ace stores. That’s not opportunistic upselling – it’s helping brands utilize the available levers to achieve their own goals.
This education extends internally, too. Hjelm is working to help Ace’s merchant team understand how media can address challenges that price promotions can’t solve. A new product sitting on the shelf that isn’t hitting trial targets? Media can drive awareness and education to the right customer segments. Facing tough year-over-year comps in a key selling period? A coordinated media burst can help shore up those numbers.
“It’s understanding what retail media can do and what types of challenges it can help address,” she says. “Things that a blunt instrument like just lowering the price isn’t going to help with.“
The key to making this philosophy stick is measurement that merchants can actually see. Hjelm has structured reporting to show incremental sales at both macro and micro levels – department-level sales driven by retail media year-to-date, month by month, alongside individual campaign results.
This transparency solves a problem plaguing retail media: merchants and media teams at war with each other.
I recently heard about a situation where a retail media leader had a particularly adversarial relationship with their chief merchant. The merchant would visit the retailer’s website daily, search for products, and find what they perceived as irrelevant ads cluttering search results. The merchant’s view: retail media was actively interfering with their job.
The antidote, in Hjelm’s experience, is proving that retail media drives total sales opportunity rather than just dropping profit through trade deals. When merchants can see both the campaign-level wins and the cumulative impact on their department’s numbers, the conversation shifts from “you’re cluttering my site” to “here’s a challenge we can solve together.“
Ace is starting in-store media the unfancy way. While the industry buzzes about digital screens and programmatic media buying, Red Vest Media is launching with printed shelf signage.
“Everything old is new again,” Hjelm says with a laugh. “We’re not breaking any molds here, but it was hugely important to at least be able to offer a way to continue to influence that customer when they come into the store.“
The co-op structure of Ace – 5,200 independently owned stores across all 50 states – actually creates an unusual advantage for in-store media development. Thousands of individual store operators are already testing audio systems and screens on their own, trying different tactics to drive sales.
“It’s almost like there are all these microcosms of testing happening,” Hjelm explains. “We can hear firsthand what their experiences are, what their pain points are. As we think about the right way to scale these capabilities, we already have huge scale in our stores. The challenge is how do we knit them together in a way that’s seamless for advertisers?“
Consolidated retailers face enormous capital expense to install screens across their entire fleet at once. Ace can learn from what’s already working in individual stores and scale selectively—a measured approach that aligns with industry realities. According to eMarketer research, when you strip out Amazon’s dominance, in-store retail media will represent only 3.3% of non-Amazon retail media spend by 2029. Ace is choosing to start simple and scale what proves out.
At a time when most retailers treat their tech choices like classified information, Hjelm is open about the company’s decision to partner with Citrus Ads (now owned by Epsilon) for its entire platform.
“I think advertisers are tired at this point, and are leery of retailers building technology, building UI/UX, and building highly customized measurement within their walls,” she says. “The idea that a retailer is going to have the best talent for that, or be able to build that for the industry standards of an industry that a retailer only faintly understands—advertisers are kind of weary of that dynamic.”
Red Vest Media’s partnership with Epsilon means launching with a mature, seamless portfolio of onsite, offsite, and in-store capabilities that fit into advertisers’ existing workflows. Brands aren’t being asked to learn a retailer-built tool or portal. Measurement is real-time and third-party. The system benefits from decades of programmatic media best practices.
“We’re not grading our own homework,” Hjelm emphasizes.
This isn’t a one-size-fits-all prescription. Hjelm acknowledges that retailers who’ve already invested heavily in data science teams, CDPs, and existing publisher relationships might need a different approach. But for Ace, starting with a blank slate, the all-in-one solution makes sense.
The broader context for Hjelm’s approach matters. When I ask her about the dynamics between realistic growth expectations and organizational pressure, she opens up about what she’s observed at other retailers where unrealistic projections created toxic environments.
“You can be growing a healthy business, doing the right thing by partners, and have an executive team or merchant team looking at it like it’s a failing business because it’s not hitting expectations that weren’t realistic to begin with.”
Her first question when evaluating the Ace opportunity: what are the company’s expectations for what this will do in its first year? The response: “You come in and you tell us.”
That breathing room creates a different environment—one where Red Vest Media can focus on building partnerships that drive advertiser growth rather than chasing quarterly fire sales to hit internal targets. It's the difference between having runway to do things right versus constant pressure to grow at all costs.
”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,” she notes.
Ace is late to retail media – Hjelm says ‘wonderfully late’ - but this is a reality that cuts both ways. The company missed the land-grab years when simply having an RMN could command advertiser attention. But arriving late means Hjelm can learn from everyone else’s mistakes: the black-box tech that alienated buyers, the org structures that created internal warfare, the overhyped projections that poisoned relationships.
Can a more collaborative setup win? Hjelm is betting that brands exhausted by adversarial dynamics will eventually migrate to networks that actually work with them rather than extract from them. The merchants at Ace will either see incremental sales showing up in their numbers, or they won’t. And if it works, Red Vest Media becomes proof that retail media can be something other than organizational friction with a revenue line attached.
Read more columns from Kiri Masters here.