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.”
