After acquiring smart TV platform Vizio in 2024, retail giant Walmart is making a stronger push into connected TV advertising with another buy. This time Walmart is setting its sights on the SMB advertiser market with the purchase of self-serve CTV ad platform Vibe.co, for a reported $1.4 billion.
Announced Tuesday, Vibe offers a self-serve tool designed to make it easier for small and mid-sized businesses and mid-market and performance brands to access and measure CTV advertising.
The Vibe platform will be integrated into the Walmart Connect retail media platform, combining self-serve ad capabilities with the retailer’s first-party customer data alongside closed-loop measurement and owned media properties such as the Vizio smart TV OS and related CTV advertising business.
While Walmart has already made moves in CTV, including via the $2.3 billion Vizio purchase, the Walmart Connect retail media network previously primarily operated in search and display formats and Vibe will bring self-serve streaming TV advertising into that ecosystem.
Per the release, by combining these, Walmart Connect aims to attract more SMB and mid-market advertisers by helping them launch CTV campaigns more easily and better measure the business impact.
Although its platform will be integrated into Walmart’s retail media network, Vibe emphasized it does not mean the product is now just for enterprise-only or retail-exclusive buyers – as Walmart aims to serve SMBs and mid-market advertisers broadly.
“Walmart Connect is focused on making commerce media more accessible, more measurable and easier to activate for advertisers of all sizes,” said Ryan Mayward, GM and SVP of Walmart Connect U.S., in a statement.
It marks a notable buy from Walmart in terms of another more direct CTV advertising play, following its acquisition of Vizio and subsequent move to make it a store TV brand the new OS powering its existing in-house brand TVs. And as its NewFronts presentation showed, with Vizio, Walmart wants to leverage the TVOS platform in part to more closely connect commerce and content – alongside the related advertising revenue and retail media business.
Separately, IAB forecasts nearly 14% in U.S. ad spend growth for connected TV this year.
And now with Vibe, that CTV advertising piece is potentially strengthened for Walmart as it’s expected to help attract an expanded, sizeable and largely untapped pool of SMB and performance advertisers to Walmart Connect and CTV more broadly.
Courting SMBs, removing historical TV barriers
We’ve previously covered some in the CTV industry’s push to take a page out of big tech’s playbook and attract the SMB market - many of which haven’t advertised on TV before but per Advertiser Perceptions collectively contributed $99 billion in U.S. ad spend in 2023.
To learn more read our earlier deep dive Special Report on CTV courting the SMB market, here.
Some efforts have been seen with the introduction of self-serve platforms, such as Comcast’s Universal Ads and the Roku Ads Manager. These offer simplified tools that help remove historical barriers to TV advertising, such as buying and activation access sans direct relationships, being priced out, and a lack of needed video ad creative or resources, among others.
Last week at the StreamTV Show in Denver, Roku Director of Ad Sales Jeff Katz spoke about the company’s self-serve ads platform during a fireside chat session moderated by this reporter, noting the $500 minimum spend requirement and traction seen with SMB and performance marketers.
According to Katz, one of the most impactful aspects for smaller and DTC advertisers is the ability to easily and inexpensively make video ad creative for CTV. Roku’s self-serve platform also taps partner Spaceback to help DTC brands convert social assets into CTV-ready ad creative, for example.
It’s worth noting Roku is a competitor to Walmart’s Vizio and poised to potentially get a new owner in the form of Fox under a proposed deal that values the CTV company at $22 billion.
As for Walmart, it said the aim from integrating Vibe’s self-serve platform is to reduce friction for SMB advertisers across planning, targeting, ad content creation, activation, measurement and optimization. Those feed into the ultimate goal of attracting more ad investment by making CTV accessible to advertisers that don’t have large media teams or vast or dedicated TV resources.
Improved CTV targeting, measurement
Self-serve platforms are also about delivering on capabilities like personalization, targeting and measurement that smaller brands and performance marketers who usually spend in walled gardens like Meta and YouTube are used to - and where CTV’s digital nature holds the potential to make it a more full-funnel marketing vehicle, providing both reach and awareness as well as lower-funnel outcomes.
In a blog post for Vibe mid-market clients outlining what the purchase by Walmart means, Vibe called out audience targeting in particular. It cited Walmart’s first-party data covering purchase behavior for more than 150 million customers across its retail stores and website. And for mid-marketers in the consumer goods, home, food, wellness and other categories with meaningful retail volume purchase, Vibe says “that data layer is a material upgrade to what CTV targeting can do” as it’s based on what people actually bought.
Per Vibe, this targeting advantage will be fully realized post-close, once Vibe’s Identity Intelligence is integrated with the Walmart shopper data.
On the measurement front, post-integration, the combo of Vibe and Walmart Connect will mean the ability to deliver on closed-loop capabilities for SMBs as part of its measurement stack. Meaning the ability to track whether a household exposed to a brand’s CTV ad subsequently purchased their product in a Walmart store or online.
Walmart also likely has its eye on e-commerce giant and rival Amazon, which has its own massive ads and commerce business and capabilities, alongside a CTV device and content play with an ecosystem that spans the Amazon DSP, Amazon Prime Shopping, Prime Video and Fire TV, among others.
Walmart also emphasized that Walmart Connect and Vibe remain “committed to operating within an open and collaborative advertising ecosystem, working with broadcasters, publishers, supply-side platforms (SSPs), measurement providers and technology partners across the industry” and is not intended to limit how advertisers engage with the Walmart Connect media ecosystem.
The Walmart-Vibe.co transaction is expected to close by the end of Walmart’s fiscal year 2027.