Walmart DSP Is Coming This Fall

There’s a new demand-side platform (DSP) in town. This time, it’s from Walmart. The retail giant announced Walmart DSP will debut in the second half of October, making it available just in time for the holiday shopping season. The retailer built the DSP in partnership with ad-tech company The Trade Desk. Rich Lehrfeld, svp of Walmart’s media business, said Walmart DSP “combines the best-in-class technology and performance of The Trade Desk with the robust scale of Walmart’s unparalleled first-party omnichannel data.” Lehrfeld said the DSP will help expand offsite media opportunities for advertisers. Walmart DSP promises to allow advertisers to reach audiences more precisely with Walmart’s past purchase and predictive audience segments, as well as brand-level shopping behavior across Walmart’s physical and digital stores. It will also allow brands access to The Trade Desk's inventory, which includes display, video, mobile, audio and CTV. Lehrfeld said what really sets Walmart DSP apart is linking of first- and third-party data sets. “To be able to bring their first-party data and third-party data, to be able to combine it with our first-party data to be able to target customers—that hasn't been done before,” Lehrfeld told Adweek. Neither has the measurement component, which he noted goes down to the SKU level, which has historically been “very hard to do” off-platform. “This gives [advertisers] a clear understanding of what their sales are doing,” he added. Walmart DSP won’t be another walled garden “We're not trying to be a walled garden," said Lehrfeld. "The goal is to make it actually an open platform where people can access inventory off the web in a multitude of different [formats]. So it's actually trying to make it a much more open platform than anything out there.” But Lehrfeld said Walmart DSP will give advertisers “an alternative” to closed environments like Google and Facebook. “I think it's additive to how [advertisers] target,” Lehrfeld said. “If they want to use us across the internet, or they want to go direct to a walled garden to execute, I think there's just lots of opportunities for us.” Lehrfeld believes Walmart DSP is “the best way to go to the largest group of users or customers.” Walmart launched its media business in July 2019. Two years on, Lehrfeld said the unit is “still young” and growing. 'Three-legged strategy" “Part of the three-legged strategy was always about growing our offsite business,” he said. “We've been actually executing supplier-funded campaigns off-platform, but this now allows us to get scale at a much larger level and [use] our first-party data to be able to target and measure off platform.” In January, Walmart renamed its media business Walmart Connect, which Lehrfeld said was “about emphasizing [its] commitment to connecting brands and [more than 150 million weekly customers] at scale.” Since then, Walmart has also expanded its ad offerings and rolled out omnichannel capabilities. “We want to make it easier for advertisers to really partner with us through programmatic and self-service solutions,” Lehrfeld said. “And the Walmart DSP is the latest release of a product innovation pipeline to deliver on that goal.” Publicis Groupe Acquires CitrusAd to Build ‘Biggest Walled Garden in the World’