Walmart Connect Partners With Snap, Roku And TikTok To Measure Online Shopping Ads
Walmart introduced a series of “Innovation Partners” that can support measuring how social media and CTV ads affect sales. For the first time ever, the retail giant is expanding its ad reach beyond its own eCommerce platform. Walmart Connect announced a new “Innovation Partners” category. This category will include video-specific measurement deals with TikTok, Snap, Roku, Fireworks, and TalkShopLive. This partnership will help to measure any sales that come from ads.
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Expanding their ad business
In recent times, Walmart has expanded impressively and has a $2 billion ad business. As Walmart’s ad business rebranded to Connect last year, it’s added new partners and ad tech companies since settling on The Trade Desk as a DSP tech provider. Advertisers and brands can buy ads with Walmart data through The Trade Desk, Walmart’s ad platform. The company added eCommerce search ad specialists such as Pacvue, Skai, and Flywheel Digital as partners in 2021. The Walmart Connect program also welcomed 14 additional analytics and ad optimization companies in July.
In the expansion mode, the retail media platform partners with TikTok and Snap to measure social commerce, Roku for CTV ads, Firework, and TalkShopLive for live shopping content. Seth Dallaire, executive vice president and CRO of Walmart, wrote in a post,
“As the media funnel continues to collapse, advertisers are realizing the opportunity to reach shoppers on leading platforms where they are increasingly spending their time.”
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The Innovative Partners
Walled gardens like Roku, TikTok, and Snap aim to demonstrate their ad platforms’ value.
The Snap agreement is a “first-of-their-kind type partnership”. It will bring advertisers Snap Ads, Collection Ads, and Snap AR with Walmart Connect geo-based measurement of omnichannel sales lift. This is the first time advertisers can buy Snap ad units through Walmart Connect and get in front of the unique Snapchat audience (75% of 13-34 year-olds in the U.S.), who hold over $1.9 trillion in spending power.
TikTok and Snap will not have their inventory available through The Trade Desk’s Walmart DSP. They are walled gardens and as a result, no outside programmatic trading desks are allowed.
The first-to-market pilot between TikTok and Walmart Connect will provide advertisers with the opportunity to serve in-feed ads on TikTok, leveraging the impact of TikTok’s sound-on full-screen video format together with Walmart Connect’s targeting and measurement.
Unlike other walled gardens, TikTok’s ad platform is widely regarded as under-attributing its own revenues. Whereas, other walled gardens generally over-attribute in their own favor. The reason behind this is that TikTok uses last-click attribution and a session-length attribution window, so it will miss sales if users don’t click and convert immediately.
Walmart recently partnered with Roku to make TV streaming the next e-commerce shopping destination. Streamers can purchase featured products fulfilled by Walmart directly on the streaming TV platform. Walmart Connect will connect brands to customers through the T-commerce platform on Roku. Advertisers will receive insights on the effectiveness of Walmart Connect measurement.
Walmart is also working with live video platforms with sponsored brand placements- TalkShop Live and Firework to produce online sales programming on Walmart.com. Walmart is testing the new service on brands such as J&J, P&G, and Samsung, among others. The program on Walmart Connect’s advertising platform is not automated but a managed service. Brands will get the performance reports of how ad campaigns influenced sales on TikTok, Snap, and Roku.
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A tight race
With its ad platform, Walmart competes with Amazon, which has also invested in live shopping programs. In addition, Amazon’s roaster of talent streams sales events, most prominently on holidays and Prime day. Roku and Pinterest have already partnered with Kroger to enter the market, and Kroger’s own ad business has been expanded with PubMatic and Magnite.
Marketers and publishers are keen to discover how consumers react to social media advertising by making purchases or engaging with it. Even though social commerce is still in its infancy, Walmart’s partnerships with social media platforms show that they are proving that their ads do lead to sales. Rich Lehrfeld, Walmart SVP and GM of the Walmart Connect group told AdExchanger,
“Over time you’ll see our partnerships starting to expand into different areas that are really what our advertisers, or what we call our customers, as well as suppliers and sellers are asking us to do because they love our measurement.”
Advertisers can leverage Walmart’s unparalleled first-party omnichannel data to deliver measurable sales performance. Furthermore, it integrates with several PPC management tools that are used by eCommerce businesses.
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Omnicom Partners With Walmart, Instacart, First Of Many eCommerce Deals at Cannes Lions
Omnicom plans to announce several e-commerce-related partnerships with major retail players during the Cannes Lions festival. Recently, the agency holding company struck its first strategic agency partnership with Walmart Connect.
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Cross-screen Planning it is!
Walmart Connect, a closed-loop omnichannel media business offers advertisers an opportunity to reach Walmart shoppers on Walmart’s site and app, across its physical locations, and on the web. The first strategic agreement lets all Omnicom agencies execute cross-screen planning against Walmart audiences in the Omni marketing orchestration platform. Planners can identify the domains, apps, and screens with the most effective reach and cost for Walmart audiences. Using the Omni ID, they can push advertisers’ first-party data to the Walmart DSP where it combines with Walmart audiences.
The retail giant is building a platform to leverage the scale of Walmart’s first-party data and strong customer relationships to help marketers deliver strong ROI in an increasingly fragmented environment. Walmart Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire said.
“Our partnership with Omnicom illustrates Walmart Connect’s focus on driving growth, improving product capabilities, and educating the industry on the role retail media platforms have in delivering measurable solutions that connect clients with omnichannel shoppers.”
The access to the WalmartDSP and within Omni will allow optimizing supply paths as well as inventory planning that will increase the investment efficiency for OMG clients. As quoted by Digiday, Megan Pagliuca, Chief Activation Officer, Omnicom Media Group said,
“We can take client first-party data, push it via the Omni ID into the Walmart DSP, then plan the right inventory paths to execute against. Having Walmart be a part of our planning capabilities gives a significant benefit to our CPG advertisers. And that is particularly powerful for the non-endemics because we can both use Walmart data, and then optimize towards other outcomes rather than in-store measurement.”
Another potential benefit of the deal is the ability to connect Walmart’s in-store TV network in its 4,700 stores to Omnicom’s programmatic OOH practice. Dallaire told Digiday,
“Omnicom has been leading the way in terms of that programmatic out-of-home space. So I see that as being a really interesting and fun area for us to collaborate.”
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Data, the oil to the e-Commerce vehicle
Omnicom making its second of a series of deals, at this week’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The agency holding company announced a strategic partnership with e-commerce player Instacart which involves sharing data and new measurement capabilities that can more directly tie sales to TV advertising.
Instacart is building a roadmap to working within the clean room infrastructure of Omni – Omnicom’s open operating system which orchestrates better outcomes for clients across the entire consumer purchasing journey. The Omni clean room allows access to previously built partnerships with NBCU & Disney for planning and measurement.
Instacart has the full insight of the sales data – right from customers searching through checkout – across different touchpoints. Instacart provides CPG brands with aggregated, anonymized, and retailer-agnostic data insights across the entire Instacart app that allows advertisers to better understand their customers’ online buying habits.
The partnership advances OMG’s goal of providing brand executives with a holistic view of media investments, allowing them to prove the effectiveness and value of advertising. Ryan Mayward, Vice President of Ad Sales at Instacart explained,
“For example, in the future, a home cleaning supply brand can better understand how its ads on Hulu drove purchase of its products on Instacart.
We can also dive deep on basket analysis and content consumption trends with Omnicom to help that brand understand which products resonate most with audiences. Our vision is to equip CPG brands with the data and shopping insights they need to better understand their business and identify growth opportunities.”
Summing up the collaboration on insights and measurement, Officer Megan Pagliuca said,
“Omnicom and Instacart can help brands transform top-of-funnel, brand-building marketing channels to outcomes-based media.”
On the series of e-Commerce moves, Omnicom eCommerce CEO Frank Kochenash concluded that each collaboration offers unique capabilities to connected commerce which will benefit the client investment across all mediums.
