Walmart creates omnichannel ad ecosystem

Walmart is expanding its in-house advertising offering with a new partner network and enhanced capabilities. 

The nation’s largest discounter is stepping up its Walmart Media Group omnichannel ad targeting and measurement business with the launch of the Walmart Advertising Partners program. The program establishes a new ecosystem designed to bolster advertisers’ ability to deliver targeted, sponsored advertising to Walmart shoppers via partnerships with digital ad platforms Flywheel Digital, Kenshoo, Pacvue, and Teikametrics.

“With these key partnerships, today we grow our search offering to meet the needs of advertisers, allowing the most advanced search marketers the ability to leverage the power of Walmart through their partner of choice,” said Lex Josephs, VP of sales and media partnerships, Walmart Media Group.

In addition, Walmart Advertising Partners is designed to expand advertisers’ direct access to their Sponsored Products campaigns. These campaigns feature pay-per-click ads which drive traffic to select items by ensuring they appear on the first page of search results and category and item pages. The new program will also feature a bidded auction-based ad marketplace, which Walmart says will increase transparency and control for participating advertisers.

In April 2019, Walmart acquired the technology and assets of Silicon Valley-based startup Polymorph Labs, anticipating that Polymorph’s technology, which includes a high-speed ad server, a self-serve interface and server-side header bidding, would make advertising easier for its partner brands while delivering more relevant digital ads to consumers.

Even before acquiring Polymorph and now launching Walmart Media Group, Walmart was already promoting itself as having the ability to measure omnichannel advertising effectiveness – such as if a customer views an ad on the Walmart website and then buys it in a Walmart store – at an unparalleled scale. The discount giant is building its Walmart Advertising Partners ecosystem to compete in a retail digital advertising marketplace currently dominated by three well-positioned players – Google, Facebook/Instagram, and Amazon.

Chain Store Age will have more coverage of the Walmart Advertising Partners launch the week of Jan. 6.