Retail media feels different when the retailer is the one selling. Ace Hardware is a co-op, with more than 2,800 independent owners running over 5,300 U.S. stores and no way to force any of them to adopt a program. Collaboration, not mandate, is the operating model, and it has shaped how RedVest Media, Ace's retail media network, grew in its first year.

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Molly Hjelm, who leads RedVest Media, returns to The Middlemen a year after her first appearance, this time from Wrigley Field. Ace chose the ballpark for its inaugural RedVest Media Upfront, a snapshot of the portfolio for a vendor community that filled the stands with more than 50 merchants.

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The through-line of the day was that Ace is in the business of growing national brands. The Elevate store redesign puts the biggest, most exclusive lines directly in the customer's sight line, but the newer story is that every brand now has a toolkit. Search and display are table stakes; the standout is Retailer Reach, a program that lets brands market directly to Ace's independent owners through the ordering platform they check daily, turning retail media into a distribution engine rather than only a demand one.

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Hjelm was candid about the friction that made the network better. When she shared strong campaign results early on, her chief merchandising officer asked what the total business impact was, not just the campaign-level return. Rather than dodge it, RedVest built total business impact into its wrap reporting. A campaign that performs but doesn't move the category isn't good enough.

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Social was among the biggest announcements: an influencer network through Influential, weighted toward micro-influencers, plus social amplification that takes existing brand creative and pushes it to a deterministic set of Ace customers with closed-loop measurement. The logic is that trust is shifting from national brands to creators, and a trusted retailer is well positioned to meet customers there.

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The DoorDash partnership drew attention for a striking figure: 90% of customers coming to Ace through DoorDash are new to Ace. With a store within 15 minutes of 75% of Americans, last-mile delivery lets Ace compete with pure-play e-commerce and reach a younger demographic that may never walk into a store.

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Chief Growth Officer John Surane tied it together, drawing a parallel between Wrigley's revival and Ace's own. As enterprise marketing grew from $30M to $240M, revenue climbed from $3B to $10B. The upfront was an education for a vendor community still forming its view of retail media; the real work, Hjelm said, is the partnership conversations that come after it, heading into 2027.