Case Study

Home Depot HBCU Advertising

The Home Depot Drives Retool Your School Success with Digital Display

Since 2009, The Home Depot has sponsored the Retool Your School program, investing over $5.2 million in 184 campus improvement grants for Historically Black Universities and Colleges (HBCUs) to celebrate their legacy and pride by upgrading and uplifting campuses.

Challenge

The Home Depot faced the annual challenge of inspiring the African American community and HBCUs to vote online for the winning school. To drive awareness, participation, and engagement for its sustainability initiative, The Home Depot partnered with KORTX for our digital media and multicultural expertise.

Strategy

Since 2020, KORTX has supported the Retool Your School initiative, from creating program awareness to the final announcement of the winner. KORTX’s team of digital experts and multicultural expertise helped drive program participation through Cross-Platform Display and Native ads.

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From the start of the partnership, we placed Axon Audience Manager tags on the Retool Your School microsite, collecting real-time site events from all users across all pages within the domain. 

To achieve long-term success across HBCUs through year-round executions, Axon implementation was crucial as The Home Depot needed a strategy that maximized First-Party data. Our team utilized detailed audience information to guide targeting and creative strategies throughout the campaign, including an audience strategy to encourage voting by targeting HBCU students, alums, professors, and administrators. 

Another Axon insight revealed that tablet devices had the highest impression delivery and CTR during two specific campaigns, possibly due to increased tablet usage in college environments.

Success

Driven by our team’s multicultural expertise and Axon’s powerful capabilities, we have successfully supported the Retool Your School initiative across nine campaigns, resulting in an average CTR of 0.25%, significantly higher than the industry average. Specific campaigns, including the Black Friday campaign, yielded even higher results, delivering a 0.49% CTR. Through ongoing Retool Your School initiatives, the partnership between The Home Depot and KORTX sustains awareness and support for this important program and the institutions and communities it benefits.

Results

0.25%

Average CTR

0.49%

Black Friday Campaign CTR

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