The news: Home Depot is sharpening its pitch to non-endemic advertisers with a new partnership with Yahoo DSP.

• Advertisers using Yahoo’s ad-buying platform will be able to target Home Depot shoppers across display, video, digital, audio, and CTV, Orange Apron Media senior director Mandy Adams told Adweek.
• The goal is to draw more spending from advertisers in adjacent categories like insurance, telecoms, auto, and travel.

The opportunity: Home Depot isn’t the only retailer attempting to win spending from brands whose products aren’t on its shelves: Albertsons, Ulta Beauty, and Best Buy are among the many companies looking to expand their reach—and consequently their share of an increasingly lucrative market.

• Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio was partially motivated by the desire to make its retail media network (RMN) more attractive to big advertisers like Ford. “We’ll probably never sell an F-150 pickup truck on our website, but we can certainly advertise it through our streaming channels,” CFO John David Rainey said in June.
• While that strategy is working well for Walmart—which, per our forecast, is set to be the fastest-growing RMN this year—other retailers will have to refine their elevator pitches to highlight their unique value proposition.
• In Home Depot’s case, that means using its first-party data to segment customers based on life stages, lifestyle, and intent—information that could be valuable to companies such as insurers looking to reach first-time homeowners, financial services firms interested in targeting the retailer’s sizable Pro network, or travel companies looking to attract more high-income clientele.

Our take: Non-endemic advertising could be a lucrative opportunity for RMNs—but it comes with its own set of challenges. Retailers have to clearly articulate what advantages they offer compared with the rest of the (very crowded) field, while measuring the impact of non-incremental ads is more difficult given the absence of closed-loop attribution.

Companies should also follow Home Depot’s lead in being strategic about the types of non-endemic advertisers they allow onto their platform. While the temptation might be to cast as wide a net as possible, limiting ad buys to brands in complementary categories will maximize effectiveness and minimize the confusion for shoppers.