Why Walmart’s New DSP With The Trade Desk Is a Sign of Things to Come

The flurry of press releases, LinkedIn announcements and new partnerships last year signaled that 2022 is surely going to be "the Year of the Self-Service First-Party Retailer DSP"—which is admittedly a mouthful but has a nice ring to it. Target Roundel led the pack early on in 2019. Then Walmart made their debut with The Trade Desk late 2021, followed by Kroger in January of this year and Walgreens in February. And with most of 2022 still in front of us, it’s a sure bet that we still have lots of retailers to go. As a retail media nerd, one offering that has interested me most in this race to the self-service enablement is the Walmart demand-side platform (DSP)—a standalone portal exclusively through The Trade Desk. It’s still early days. But having rolled out alphas and betas for some of my agency’s enterprise clients over the years, I can tell you this one is significant. But first, a quick explainer on what Walmart’s DSP is and how it came to be: Way back in 2016, (when Beyoncé was making Lemonade and The Revenant was racking up all the Academy Awards), brick-and-mortar retailers realized their online properties were good places to sell advertising. In the years that followed, there were some struggles. Painful struggles. First off, retailers are retailers, not digital publishers. They're also not mar tech companies. And retailers have forever lived in a world with loads of planning and one-year lead times to acquire products and get them distributed to physical locations. So when retailers and digital marketers finally started dating seriously, there were bound to be some bumps in the road. Digital marketers, they want it yesterday. They also wanted the kinds of insights they are used to getting from other digital platforms in addition to justifications and data that retailers don't generally have readily on hand. Which brings us to now. And why a mature DSP, with self-service capabilities and great technical chops, partnering with the U.S.’s largest physical retailer with its 60 years of history and robust first-party data, is the next big thing. Together, a lot of these marriage issues get worked out, which tremendously benefits us marketers. Our lives got better because The Trade Desk has a lot of features, metrics and capabilities to build upon versus starting from the ground up, which has been the operational starting point for several retail media programs. Go faster and get more granular Marketers always want to go faster. The ability to set up, bring over or create audiences, ramp up and optimize is only limited by how quickly you can get your creative in order—and if you know what, or who, you want to find with your campaigns. Currently, with most retailers and managed display offerings, you’re working in weeks or a couple of months ahead of the launch date. That will still be true for on-site, to some extent, and definitely for premium placements like homepage lockouts and editorial-type content. But with a self-service off-site offering, you can skip the walking part and get straight to flying. Then you have a digital marketer’s lifeblood: granularity. The details that feed us Type A marketers so we can understand and master the details of how to drive performance across campaigns. By starting with a mature platform, we’ll see not only an immense library of available audiences through The Trade Desk but also the safety and brand standards we need to scale. In addition, marketers will get to leverage all those existing toolsets for the forecasting and optimization that we love so much. Add in the Walmart first-party audiences you want and set up campaigns that zero in on audiences more explicitly than the broad packages of audiences that are standard today with most retailer-managed offerings. Using The Trade Desk reporting to review in almost real time—that sales data from 4,700 stores still takes a few days to fully populate—a marketer can make the necessary adjustments in days, instead of weeks or a month. Be more creative Yes, you can. While creative on the Walmart DSP via The Trade Desk does have some specifications to abide by (the usual around sizing, padding, Walmart logo placement, etc.) and the restrictions you’d expect to see around products such as pharma and guns, there are now some pretty exciting creative options available. Within The Trade Desk, you’ll be able to see down to the creative ID on those metrics we love—impressions, clicks and yes, sales. If you aren’t driving to Walmart.com, the landing page does have to be pretty plain in terms of calls to action (basically none) and focus more on educational aspects. Right now, this offering is focused on those that are endemic (i.e. in the store) to Walmart, so save this for later. This is where a brand can show off being a brand—before the shopper gets to the Walmart experience. Walmart, of course, has its own brand identity to maintain and safeguard, but now there is room for you to call attention to yours in Walmart's ecosystem. Are we omnichanneling yet? Almost! We’re moving up the funnel, we’re getting creative, we’re targeting audiences where they are and that first-party retailer data is in play—helping us connect the dots for effectiveness wherever the shopper is when they’re ready to buy. All that said, we’re just getting started: The way these programs are funded, the teams running them, in-house or agency—and whether we’re mentally and tactically at a place in these organizations to fully take advantage of something like this—are going to take a few more at-bats. But good news: We’re going to hit a lot more balls a lot farther than we used to. How do I follow the signs? General release is yet to come, but those with The Trade Desk seats or connections to one, paired with a Walmart Connect point of contact, can inquire as to where you’d stand for activation in the near term. You do need to be endemic to the store (doesn’t have to be all of them, but you’ll want good national distribution) and meet the recommended budget minimums to be able to gather enough audiences to compete and have results that can be directional. The Trade Desk does have a solid case study live today that hones in on physical store availability relative to where the media shows. Again, it’s early days, as I remind my fellow digital marketers out there—but let’s keep the pressure on.