On her first day at Cardlytics, Melanie Babcock-Brown sat beside a data scientist who showed her an algorithm. He stood back, impressed by what was on the screen. She had no idea what she was looking at. So she congratulated him, walked out of the meeting, and wondered whether she had made a serious career mistake.
It is a useful place to begin because the scene contains the recurring motion of her career. She gets close to an unfamiliar system. She admits, at least to herself, that fluency has not arrived yet. Then she learns enough to connect the machinery to an ordinary human decision.
The Cardlytics job did not end in retreat. Its data scientists taught her how customer behavior could shape media outcomes, and she later described the experience as a change in the trajectory of her career. The intimidating algorithm became a bridge. Years later, she would help move The Home Depot from campaigns arranged around products toward marketing arranged around customers. She would help build its retail media network, turn it into a dedicated business, and insist that the ads serve the shopping experience rather than crowd it.
Now the setting is different. In October 2025, Babcock-Brown joined 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as chief marketing and growth officer, a newly created role reporting to chief executive Adolfo Villagomez. Her remit joins strategy, brand positioning, acquisition, retention, and revenue growth. The company sells flowers, food, keepsakes, and other gifts across more than 18 brands. The operating problem is complicated. The customer impulse is beautifully simple: someone wants another person to feel remembered.
A career built through adjacent systems
The through line is less about industry than translation: technical systems made useful to customers.
Chapter oneThe useful detour
Babcock-Brown grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned a bachelor of science in kinesiology from the University of Michigan in 1995. The degree could have sent her in one direction. She discovered she did not want the field to become her career. Her father, who worked in the early days of information technology at General Motors, suggested IT as a place to find steady work.
The timing mattered. Website development in the mid-1990s was still young enough to feel like a hybrid job. It involved technology, visual judgment, advertising, and business problem-solving before companies had neat departments for each part. She earned a master's degree in information and communications systems from Ball State University in 1996 and found a professional language broad enough to hold both creative and technical instincts.
Leadership roles at Ketchum, MSL GROUP/Publicis Groupe, and Cardlytics followed. Those stops put her near three forces that would later converge: brand communication, social and digital behavior, and transaction data. By the time she joined The Home Depot in 2013 as senior director of social media, she was not entering retail as a single-channel marketer. She was carrying a habit of looking across channels and asking how the parts might behave as one system.
“Just because a company owns first-party data doesn't mean it is better or special.”Melanie Babcock-Brown on retail media
Chapter twoFrom products to projects
A home-improvement customer rarely arrives as a blank demographic. They arrive with a loose hinge, a leaking faucet, an empty room, a contractor's schedule, or a garden that needs another attempt. Babcock-Brown saw intent hidden inside the project. Two people buying a ladder may look similar in an audience segment while facing very different jobs, risks, and timetables.
That distinction helped organize a broader marketing shift. Beginning in 2016, she championed work that moved The Home Depot away from a product-centric model and toward customer-based personalization. Data from online and offline interactions could show not only what somebody clicked, but the project they might be trying to finish. Relevance came from serving the next useful step.
The theory survived contact with failure. At SXSW in 2018, she described a paint campaign that she expected to work. It returned zero dollars. The confession is revealing because leaders can turn a failed bet into theater, blame, or silence. She turned it into a public lesson about measurement. Certainty had met evidence, and evidence won.
The operating loop
Babcock-Brown's recurring move: translate behavior into context, then context into help.
Her customer-based marketing work coincided with a more connected retail experience and a much larger personalization practice. In 2022, Adobe named her Experience Maker Executive of the Year for the Americas. During the virtual ceremony, one of her daughters, then 12, sat beside her taking pictures. She lifted the trophy and declared it really heavy. It was a small family moment inside a corporate award, and it landed on Babcock-Brown's broader view of achievement: work matters in part because other people are watching what becomes possible.
Chapter threeA media business with boundaries
The Home Depot's retail media project began with practical requests from suppliers. Could they drive shoppers back to product pages? Could a product stand out in the digital aisle when a customer was ready to decide? The network launched in 2019, and Babcock-Brown eventually became vice president of Retail Media+ and monetization in 2023.
Retail media was becoming fashionable, but she resisted treating first-party data as a magic substance. Data only mattered when paired with a distinct customer relationship and a sound experience. Home Depot shoppers research. Contractors and consumers operate on different clocks. A bathroom renovation creates a different consideration path from a replacement lightbulb. Media could help suppliers enter those journeys, but relevance had to set the boundary.
She described discussions in which the answer to an ad placement was no. Saying no could hurt the advertising side of the business, yet protect the customer and the Home Depot brand. That trade is the heart of her operating philosophy. A local win that weakens the larger system is an expensive win.
In 2024, Retail Media+ became Orange Apron Media. The name borrowed the symbol of in-store service, making the supplier promise visible: this would be a relationship, not merely a block of inventory. The team also introduced Orange Access, bringing on-site and off-site buying, optimization, and reporting into one experience. Its InFronts gathering grew from a campus auditorium to a two-day event at Truist Park in Atlanta in 2025. The network had become an organization with its own products, technology, clients, meetings, and language.
“Our job is to ensure Home Depot is successful, that our suppliers are successful, and that our customers feel taken care of.”Melanie Babcock-Brown
Chapter fourThe quiet mechanics of candor
Babcock-Brown's public language about leadership is strikingly operational. Give a large team two goals that everyone can see themselves producing. Hold skip-level conversations. Ask what is not working. Send a Friday email that connects each team's work to the larger effort. Share difficult news without coating it in cheer.
She has said that safe mistakes are part of developing people. A strong performer needs room to try unfamiliar technology, analyze data differently, and understand financial consequences. Her pride in hiring and promoting people is concrete: a larger role changes a career, a family, and an income.
One colleague told her that she had never worked for a senior female role model who was married and raising active children. Seeing Babcock-Brown pursue family and career ambitions influenced her decision to return to work after having children. Babcock-Brown and her husband have two daughters, and she has described many off-hours spent at their travel softball fields. The lesson was not delivered as a leadership program. It was absorbed from proximity.
The stealable system: Pick very few shared goals. Create a weekly rhythm for context. Ask for bad news directly. Let evidence overrule confidence. Treat a promotion as an outcome with consequences beyond the org chart.
Chapter fiveEngineering an act of care
At 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Babcock-Brown has inherited another translation problem. The portfolio includes flowers, gourmet food, personalized objects, and brands with their own histories. A shopper may know the occasion but not the product. They may know the recipient but not the right expression. Discovery has to narrow uncertainty without turning a gesture into a sterile recommendation.
Her mandate calls for a full-funnel flywheel spanning awareness, acquisition, and retention. It also calls for more intuitive discovery, stronger data infrastructure, simpler brand architecture, and an end-to-end AI strategy. These phrases can dissolve into corporate abstraction. Her earlier work offers a more grounded reading: connect the signals, protect trust, and make the next decision easier.
Home improvement and gifting share a curious structure. The item is only the visible part of the job. A ladder represents a project and a bouquet represents a message. Customers bring context that the product page cannot fully contain. The marketer's work begins in that gap.
When she accepted the role, Babcock-Brown said she was energized by the opportunity to help write the next chapter of a brand with 50 years of heritage and cultural connection. Her record suggests that the chapter will be built before it is advertised. Data foundations. Team structures. A clearer portfolio. Feedback moving in both directions. Technology assigned to a customer problem.
The algorithm from that first Cardlytics meeting is long gone. The reflex it provoked remains. Stand close to the unfamiliar thing. Learn its grammar. Then ask what it can do for a person trying to make a choice. At 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, that choice often carries affection, apology, gratitude, or grief. The system has to be sophisticated. The feeling cannot look engineered.