Walmart’s planned $2.3 billion acquisition of smart TV maker Vizio offers one other sign that retail media networks have entered a latest era, one focused on expansion into premium promoting channels like connected TV (CTV) and streaming. The deal may also lend credence to concerns that retail media could follow the identical path as past digital platforms, with only a handful of dominant players rising to the highest to ascertain walled gardens within the vein of Google and Meta. Brands that relied on Vizio for media planning and buying and measurement may soon have to turn to Walmart to conduct those areas of business, shrinking their options.
“This is a positive move for Walmart and Vizio, but will undoubtedly shake up the space for advertisers currently counting on Vizio’s raw viewership data as a part of their promoting or measurement stack,” Ashwin Navin, CEO of Samba TV, said in comments shared with Marketing Dive. Navin claims Samba TV is now the “only independent first-party TV data and measurement provider available in the market.”
Vizio was valued by marketers for interoperable data sets stemming from areas like its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology that helps discover what the viewer of a sensible TV is watching. The fear for some media executives is that that data may turn out to be harder and costlier to access under Walmart’s ownership. Walmart Connect declined to comment on specifics of the deal resulting from the acquisition not being finalized.
A game-changing deal?
Walmart is purchasing Vizio to strengthen its U.S. retail media arm Walmart Connect, already a category leader. Walmart Connect saw growth up 30% in fiscal 2024, while the big-box store’s global ad business that features offerings like FlipKart reached $3.4 billion in revenue. Vizio brings over its own suite of ad solutions and greater than 500 direct brand relationships, expanding Walmart Connect’s scale. Vizio’s Platform Plus unit which mostly focuses on promoting accounts for nearly all of gross company profits.
While the long-term impact of the acquisition is yet to be seen, it’s clear Walmart intends to create a more robust ecosystem where it could possibly link together various channels, reminiscent of its Walmart+ e-commerce platform and Vizio’s CTV capabilities, to drive effective promoting. That is to say, Walmart could begin to look quite a bit more like Amazon, which can be ramping up a concentrate on promoting via its Prime Video streaming portal and owns the rival Fire TV line of hardware.
“The acquisition of Vizio by Walmart is a game-changer for the retail and streaming sectors, even when it’s not ultimately so surprising,” said Alex Yip, director of CTV product at AppsFlyer, over email. “Walmart isn’t only adding a well-liked private label TV brand to its portfolio, but additionally having access to an enormous amount of first-party consumer data that can enhance its promoting and streaming capabilities.”
“This deal will help Walmart diversify its revenue sources, increase its customer loyalty, and challenge Amazon’s dominance within the e-commerce and streaming sectors,” Yip continued.
CTV convergence
Other retail media networks have turned to CTV as their next big opportunity, courting marketers that need to deliver more precise promoting on the backs of first-party shopper data. Those demands have continued to climb as signal loss intensifies amid the death of the cookie.
“As Google deprecates third-party cookies and advertisers proceed to hunt latest opportunities to get in front of their audiences, we are going to see a convergence in digital promoting, especially with growing channels like retail media and CTV,” said Brian Gleason, chief revenue officer at Criteo, over email.
Areas like CTV give retail media networks the prospect to try to flex their muscles with upper-funnel tactics where they’ve historically been lacking. With Vizio, Walmart Connect closes the knowledge gap even faster. Researcher eMarketer expects CTV promoting revenue within the U.S. will climb 22.4% to achieve $30.1 billion this yr.
“The move gives Walmart a powerful foothold within the CTV promoting market,” said Nikhil Raj, a former Walmart executive who now serves as chief business officer for retail media at Moloco, in an email. “It also collapses the CTV ads value chain enabling Walmart to put the demand from retail media by itself supply, no different than Amazon with its Prime Video inventory.”
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