Home Improvement Built Momentum on Retail Media

Summary

Home improvement retail media historically peaks in spring, but July reversed the slowdown: category impressions jumped 110% YoY to a record 1.1B, powered by Paint brands Behr, HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams, Valspar and Rust-Oleum. The spike came from campaigns tied to summer moments and promotions. The Home Depot featured Behr in Build It Like Beckham, with David Beckham prepping his backyard for the World Cup.

Lowe's ran a 4th of July BOGO across HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams and Valspar. Ace Hardware promoted 20% off Benjamin Moore, while Rust-Oleum pushed Stops Rust across multiple RMNs. Product distribution shapes strategy: Ryobi, Makita and Kobalt concentrated spend with one retailer; Behr, Valspar and Sherwin-Williams focused on Amazon plus a primary home improvement retailer; Miracle-Gro and Rust-Oleum spanned the broadest RMN mix and ranked #3 and #4 in YTD impressions.

Channel choices vary. In 2026 YTD, Amazon was the top Home Improvement RMN at 1.5B impressions, relying heavily on OnSite Display. Home Depot and Lowe's had similar strategies, with Facebook driving more than half of impressions.

Walmart used Snapchat for Summer Rollbacks, and Instacart emphasized OTT via a Home Improvement version of My Instacart Story, showing shoppers ordering Lowe's products and saving time for gardening. For ad ops decision-makers, the lesson is to treat seasonal playbooks as flexible, monitor category anomalies, and align RMN and channel mixes with distribution and partnership realities. Test cultural tie-ins, promo-led creative, OnSite Display, Facebook, Snapchat and OTT based on audience and funnel goals, and measure incrementality during unexpected peak windows.

Build daily monitoring and flexible inventory plans so non-traditional spikes are not missed. Audit RMN overlap, diversify where product distribution supports it, and coordinate creative across retail and cultural moments. This case shows paint can shift category seasonality and that channel mix should follow shopper behavior, not legacy calendars.

Analyst Note

The July spike in Home Improvement retail media impressions, driven by paint brands, signals a shift in seasonality that ad ops teams should note. Historically, spring was the peak, but this summer's +110% YoY growth suggests retail media networks are successfully extending campaign relevance beyond traditional windows. What's notable is how product distribution dictates media strategy: brands with single-retailer focus (Ryobi) versus those spanning multiple RMNs (Miracle-Gro) create fragmented channel mixes.

Amazon leads with 1.5B impressions YTD, relying on OnSite Display, while Home Depot and Lowe's concentrate on Facebook, and Walmart and Instacart diversify into Snapchat and OTT. The key implication is that retail media is maturing into a year-round channel, converging with social and CTV—a trend fueled by first-party data advantages amid privacy shifts. For UA teams, this means cross-channel coordination across RMNs becomes more critical, as does aligning creative with retailer-specific moments.

Worth watching: how these channel strategies evolve as more brands leverage retail media's authenticated environments to reach shoppers beyond seasonal peaks.