Home Depot's Orange Apron Media held its third annual "InFronts" event last week in Atlanta. I drove an hour minutes through rush hour traffic to get there. Pretty much everyone else had flown in for the day.
That alone tells you something. A few hundred brands ("suppliers" in Home Depot parlance) traveled to Atlanta for a single-day event — and left energized. In a year where everyone's questioning ROI on conference travel, that's compelling pull.
I covered the product announcements in a couple of pieces last week. This piece is about something different: what Home Depot got right about the event itself, and what other retail media networks can learn from the format.
1. They didn't try to be Amazon Unboxed
A lot of RMN leaders look at Amazon's multi-day Unboxed extravaganza and think: we could never do that. They're right — and they shouldn't try. Home Depot built something fit to purpose and fit to size. One day. One venue. A focused audience of the suppliers who actually buy their media products. No sprawling expo floor, no press circus (I was one of two journalists/analysts that attended). There isn't just one playbook.
2. A closed advertiser universe is actually an advantage
Home Depot is a single-category retailer with a curated catalog and a finite set of brand suppliers. That means they can realistically get most of their key advertisers in one room — something that other retailers could never pull off. That constraint turns into a strength: the InFronts can touch on the full range of OAM's capabilities, answer questions in real time, and build buy-in across the supplier base more effectively than a trade show booth ever could.
3. They put merchants on stage first
The first keynote came from the merchandising organization, not the media team. Product announcements didn't start until the afternoon. Home Depot never called this out explicitly — they didn't need to. The agenda spoke for itself. [I wrote about why this matters here.]
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4. The event served three audiences at once
The suppliers in the seats were the obvious audience. But the room also included tech and integration partners — Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Google, MetaRouter, Vantage — who are essential to OAM's ecosystem. And then there were Orange Apron Media's own employees. The team has grown from roughly 30 people in 2020 to more than 400 today. I spoke with a few folks on the engineering side who were buzzing about seeing their tech leader Arun Ramaswamy present work they'd been building. For a team that size, an event like this doubles as a rallying point.
5. They brought supplier voices into the programming
Home Depot brought suppliers on stage and ran video testimonials throughout the day. It's a small programming choice that matters: it gives the event social proof and breaks up the inevitable sales pitch cadence. From what I understand, this was new to this year's event.
6. The venue reinforced the brand
The College Football Hall of Fame was — I'll be honest — completely lost on me as a sports-indifferent Australian. But for the attendees? It was a hit. Last year they used Truist Park, another major Atlanta sports venue. Sports sponsorship is a core part of Home Depot's broader brand identity, and choosing venues that reflect that is a small detail that signals intentionality. It also just gave many people a reason to be excited about showing up.
7. Be intentional with press and analysts
Are you sick of hearing about Orange Apron Media yet? This is the third piece I've written about OAM in a week — a column for The Drum, a profile of OAM's category-specific advantages, and now this. That wasn't my plan going in. But Home Depot gave me enough access, context, and material across a single day that three distinct angles emerged naturally.
There were two journalists/analysts at the InFronts — me and Karen Jacobs, the senior editor of retail and performance at eMarketer who wrote about OAM's new partnership with Reddit. Home Depot went narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow, and the result is substantive coverage.
Not every retailer needs its own upfront event — and Home Depot certainly wasn't the first to host one. But the format is gaining momentum. Ascendant Network, which runs the well-regarded Retail Media Boot Camp series, recently announced SHOWCASE — a collective upfront in New York this September where multiple commerce media networks will present to brands and agencies in a single day. For networks that don't have the supplier base to fill a room on their own, or those looking to reach new advertisers, that kind of shared format could be a smart complement.
Either way, the underlying idea is the same: there's real value in getting your advertisers in a room, on your terms, with a story worth telling.
