Retail media is growing. The technology is available. CEOs are asking about it.

That still doesn’t mean every retailer should build a network. This may be the most important distinction Molly Hjelm, corporate vice president and head of retail media, Ace Hardware, made during her keynote session at Total Retail Tech in Dallas last month. (Total Retail is the sister brand of Women in Retail Leadership Circle.)

In a business environment that rewards speed, leaders can feel pressure to pursue every promising opportunity before someone else does. However, access to an opportunity isn’t the same as having a right to win.

Hjelm has spent much of the past decade building retail media businesses. In 2025, Ace Hardware handed her a blank sheet of paper, significant leadership trust and, as she put it, “approximately zero headcount” to create a retail media network (RMN) from scratch.

Six months later, Red Vest Media was profitable. Within its first year, 100 vendors had invested.

The result is impressive. The thinking behind it is more useful.

A Large Market Isn’t Automatically Your Market

Retail media is projected to become a $142 billion industry by 2030. Yet more than 270 RMNs are already competing for advertisers’ attention, with much of the spending concentrated among the largest players.

The numbers may justify exploring the opportunity. They do not eliminate the need for a clear strategy.

“The question isn’t whether you can build something,” Hjelm said. “It’s whether you should.”

That question reaches far beyond retail media. Not every strategy will work for every business, and that’s OK. The discipline is knowing whether an opportunity aligns with your assets, customers and relationships before committing resources to it.

Having stores, an e-commerce platform or first-party data is no longer enough. The more revealing question is: What can your company offer that another business cannot easily reproduce?

Build Around Your Unfair Advantage

Ace Hardware didn’t succeed by recreating another retailer’s network. Its advantage came from the business it already was: 5,300 independently owned stores across all 50 states, 80 million Ace Rewards members, thousands of vendor relationships, and deep connections to local communities.

Those independent store owners created another unusual opportunity. Ace could help brands reach customers, but it could also introduce products to store owners and potentially expand their distribution.

That capability wouldn’t make sense for every RMN. It made perfect sense for Ace Hardware.

Leaders often identify an attractive market and adopt its established playbook, even when that playbook has little connection to what makes their own business valuable. Hjelm’s approach suggests the opposite: Start with your unfair advantage, then build the model around it.

Differentiation shouldn’t be added after the foundation is complete. It should determine what gets built.

Own What Makes the Relationship Valuable

Ace outsourced operational capabilities such as ad buying and media billing. However, it didn’t outsource its strategy, product vision or vendor relationships.

“The prime value that you’re bringing as a retailer to the ecosystem is not the media that you have, but the relationship that you have with the customer,” Hjelm explained.

Leaders don’t need to own every capability. But outsourcing becomes risky when it removes the business from the relationships and decisions that create its value.

Technology can be rented. Operational expertise can be hired. A trusted customer or vendor relationship is much harder to replace.

The question isn’t only “What can we outsource?” It’s “What must remain ours?”

Transparency Includes Showing What Didn’t Work

Red Vest Media launched with real-time, third-party measurement connecting campaigns to online and in-store sales. Vendors could see what happened after they invested, while merchants, media teams and brand partners could make decisions from the same information.

Returning vendors increased their investments by an average of 500 percent, according to Hjelm.

However, Hjelm’s most interesting point wasn’t that measurement proved everything worked. It was that Ace was willing to show when it didn’t.

The team examined whether campaigns moved a vendor’s total business, not only the products being promoted. Sometimes the results didn’t show a clear lift. Rather than hide that ambiguity, Ace used it to have a more honest conversation about what would be needed to create growth.

Data is not only useful when it validates a strategy. Its real value is giving leaders the confidence to adjust, invest further or admit that something didn’t work as expected.

Let a New Business Behave Like a New Business

Hjelm’s final recommendation was also her simplest: “Let it be a startup.”

A new business operating inside an established retail organization can easily inherit assumptions about headcount, budgets and growth that were designed for a different model. It can also inherit a revenue target before the team has tested the market.

When reality fails to match that projection, leaders may feel pressure to discount or extract more money from partners than the performance supports. That can damage the relationships the business needs to grow.

Innovation requires accountability, but it also requires room to learn. Leaders need to create clear guardrails without forcing a new idea to prove itself according to an old operating model.

Retail media was the subject of Hjelm’s keynote, but her larger lesson applies to any leader evaluating what comes next.

You don’t need to pursue every opportunity. You do need to understand where your business has a credible advantage, protect the relationships that create value, and remain honest about the results.

The strongest strategy isn’t the one that follows the market fastest. It’s the one your business is uniquely equipped to make work.