What’s the thinking behind Lowe’s recent ad partnerships?

The retail media arm at Lowe’s recently struck new partnerships with tech, social, and entertainment platforms to position itself as a place that offers brands ad units ranging from search ads to video ads to target customers at different points in the shopping journey.

The home improvement chain is taking its ad business beyond its own channels to platforms like Roku, YouTube, DoorDash, and Reddit. Retail customers are engaging on these platforms and that’s where Lowe’s and its sellers can reach them through advertising, Elyse Blouin, VP and GM of Lowe’s Media Network, told Retail Brew. “We’re really investing in all areas of advertising across the full funnel.”

Each platform lets brands and retailers reach customers where they watch, discover, engage, and shop, the company said. The new partnerships at Lowe’s Media Network are based on advertiser demand and requests for more brand awareness and brand discovery channels as they seek to find new customers, Blouin added.

Broadly speaking, upper-funnel video ads that run on platforms like YouTube or Roku are marketing campaigns targeted to build brand awareness and introduce products to a broad audience.

Lowe’s onsite ads are run on its website and app, while offsite ads are ones displayed on other websites, social media platforms, or on streaming TV.

“As a retail media network, we want to make sure that we’re evolving beyond just onsite ads and digital offsite ads,” she said.

Lowe’s retail media business, which started in 2021, isn’t as big as Amazon’s or Walmart’s but falls under the next tier of smaller-scale retail media networks. In June 2025, Lowe’s launched a creator network with MrBeast as its first major partner.

Ad-dictive: Partnerships with Roku and YouTube will let advertisers using Lowe’s Media Network engage with streaming audiences at the discovery stage when they are shopping for items.

“Roku and YouTube play more in the upper-funnel video [ads],” Blouin said. “DoorDash offers us a unique opportunity to get and reach incremental customers that may not be necessarily engaging on Lowes.com.”.

Deep dive: Reddit, Blouin said, is significant in terms of “influencing” AI searches. “We have a lot of demand there from advertising partners as they know that AEO [or answer engine optimization, sometimes also referred to as agentic engine optimization] is really important to them,” she added.

AEO has ended up firmly in retail circles ever since public AI surfaces became a popular way for people to search for and discover products online.

Lowe’s has also partnered with third-party research firm Ipsos to measure sales that happen because of ads run on its retail media network independently to build solid measurement solutions in retail media.

“We offer our advertising partners both agile attribution and their own bespoke media mix models,” Blouin said. “That allows us to ensure that we’re delivering incremental return on ad spend.”