Almost two years ago, Walmart bought Vizio for $2.3 billion. Now advertisers are getting a look at Walmart’s ambitions to change how streaming ads are bought and measured.
Walmart’s pitch comes as the retailer is putting together a streaming ecosystem. In August, Walmart acquired adtech firm Vibe.co for a reported $1.4 billion. With Vizio, the deal changes the ambitions of Walmart Connect—the retailer’s ad business—from selling performance-based ads for suppliers to selling streaming ads.
As a result, Walmart is trying to pitch itself to so-called non-endemic advertisers who do not sell products at Walmart. The acquisitions of Vibe and Vizio have already given Walmart “thousands” of relationships with brands that don’t sell anything at Walmart, or don’t have a preexisting relationship with Walmart, Ryan Mayward, svp and gm of Walmart Connect, told advertisers during an event in New York on Tuesday.
“You’ll see those advertisers benefit more and more from our partnerships and from the solutions that we bring forward to solve fragmented customer attention,” Mayward said.
Walmart has also inked new partnerships with Skydance and Spotify to help brands reach Walmart customers on platforms beyond its own within Walmart’s demand-side platform. Additionally, Walmart’s partnership with Yahoo DSP is moving into alpha and expanding beyond Walmart-owned Vizio to include streaming inventory from additional publishers.
“I’d like you to think about our commerce insights as the center of a partnership ecosystem where our partners, social platforms, TV networks, DSPs, audio, streaming companies have all come together to solve fragmentation problems for our mutual clients,” Mayward told the room of advertisers.
At the same time that Walmart Connect’s pitch is evolving to focus on TV advertising, Vizio’s ad pitch is increasingly focusing on performance-focused advertisers.
“We’re creating the ‘Walmart welcome’ in your home, a trusted environment where entertainment, brands, and commerce can come together naturally,” said Courtney Naudo, svp and gm for Vizio. “Together with Walmart Connect, we can turn that trusted relationship into something incredibly powerful for marketers, connecting the influence of the living room more directly to commerce.”
Through Vizio, Walmart is launching series that feature products available in its stores and online. “For decades, television has been one of the most powerful tools brands have to build awareness and affinity,” Naudo said. “Now, we have the opportunity to connect that influence directly to commerce, and this is where Vizio’s power is within Walmart.”
Walmart’s U.S. ad business saw year-over-year sales growth of 38% in the second quarter. Mayward told ADWEEK that Walmart is hoping to satisfy advertisers who have long wanted to tie their TV investments to sales outcomes for their products.
“Those capabilities have been emerging, and mostly emerging in the retail space,” Mayward said. “We’re taking full advantage of the opportunity to deliver the type of measurement that brands are asking for.”
What Vibe.co brings to Walmart
Mayward described Vibe.co as a tech platform for smaller advertisers to activate streaming campaigns, adding that Vibe.co will help Walmart’s marketplace of sellers run streaming campaigns for the first time.
While proving sales is key for brands that sell at Walmart, advertisers who don’t sell at Walmart can still take advantage of the company’s audience targeting, as well as Vibe.co’s tools that automatically optimize streaming campaigns.
“We believe that there are tens of billions waiting to be invested on CTV,” said Arthur Querou, cofounder and CEO of Vibe.co. “It can actually be much bigger, especially when you look at the spend that the [small- and medium-sized businesses] are sending to social or are sending to search, or are going to send to AI.”
Mayward said Vibe.co has already proven that performance-based streaming advertising is possible across different categories.
“The advertiser overlap between Vibe and Walmart Connect at the time of acquisition was almost nonexistent,” Mayward said, adding that the Vibe.co team will continue to onboard its own advertisers like direct-to-consumer brands and gaming companies.
“Adding our data into their optimization capabilities is going to prove that commerce insights will drive stronger outcomes for brands, whether they sell products at Walmart or not,” he added. “We’ve done some of that already with very large brands that have been testing CTV with Walmart Connect—I think that Vibe just accelerates our ability to prove that.”
For example, Mayward said that insurance companies wanting to target people going through certain life changes such as having a baby, becoming empty-nesters, or retiring, could identify those consumers via what they are buying at Walmart.
“We can say, ‘These are folks who are new moms,’ ‘These are folks who are moving,’ ‘These are recently-retired households,” Mayward said. “Those types of life stages can be very useful to a wide range of marketers.”
