Walmart expands retail media network reach with partnerships
Walmart is collaborating with several social and streaming companies to extend the reach of its Walmart Connect closed-loop media business.
Walmart Connect offers advertisers the ability to serve personalized, time- and context-specific ads across customer touchpoints including media placements on in-store TV walls and self-checkout screens, Walmart digital properties, mobile devices, and corporate events.
As part of Walmart Connect, the discount giant operates the Walmart Connect Partner Lab, which is designed to develop omnichannel connections for advertisers across various platforms. In September 2022, Walmart Connect introduced its Innovation Partners program, which provides what the retailer calls “test and learn” opportunities with social, entertainment, digital TV commerce and livestreaming entities.
The program launched with partners including Roku, TalkShopLive, and TikTok. In a corporate blog post, Sylvia Yam, senior director of strategy and business development, Walmart Connect, provided initial results from partnerships with Roku, TalkShopLive and TikTok, and also announced the addition of NBCUniversal to the Partner Lab.
Highlights of each partnership follow:
NBCUniversal
Walmart Connect will offer its advertisers retail media-powered ads within NBCUniversal’s live sports streaming inventory, in time for fall 2023 sports seasons and holiday campaigns. This marks the first time NBCUniversal streaming content will be available through a retail media network.
“At NBCUniversal, we know that partnerships fuel progress – and we’re delighted to partner with Walmart Connect to bring brands and sports fans closer together through the content and shopping experiences that keep them on the edge of their seats,” said Joe Cady, executive VP of advanced advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. “Sports enthusiasts are an unmatched audience, and with the power and scale of NBCUniversal’s digital advertising capabilities, combined in a privacy-minded way, with Walmart Connect’s shopper data, we’re able to add even more value for advertisers. It’s a win-win across the board.”
Roku
Roku and Walmart, which launched a shoppable ads partnership in 2022, have found that 57% of Roku streamers have paused a Walmart Connect ad to shop the product online. The experience offers product discovery with a seamless, on-screen checkout experience with a Roku remote.
“We believe a frictionless omnichannel shopping experience is where the industry is going and should go,” said Jeff Metzner, vice president of Walmart Team marketing and communications at Procter & Gamble. “The ability to purchase a product directly from a connected TV ad has potential to reduce that friction for the consumer, so we’d like to see these capabilities continue to develop.”
During the pilot, which ran from November 2022 to February 2023, these shoppable Roku ads received at least three times higher clickthrough rates than average video campaigns powered by the Walmart demand-side platform.
Now, Walmart Connect is expanding its Roku partnership to premium Roku inventory within our connected TV offering now available on the Walmart demand side platform.
TikTok
With its first round of pilot campaigns on the TikTok short-form video platform complete, Walmart says it found clear indications that Walmart Connect-powered TikTok ads with targeted audiences are generating an average of two times higher engagement rates than TikTok’s standard benchmarks for campaigns in the U.S. The average video viewing time of Walmart customers also exceeded industry benchmarks.
TalkShopLive
Walmart and livestream shopping platform TalkShopLive first partnered in 2021 for shoppable livestream events. That partnership extended to Walmart Connect in 2022, to test how suppliers can seamlessly create and amplify livestream content at scale by combining Walmart’s retail media capabilities with TalkShopLive’s livestream experiences on Walmart.com, as well as TalkShopLive’s platform, brand and publisher sites, and across the web.
A recent livestream shopping event with multiple electronics suppliers on the Walmart.com livestream page – powered by Walmart Connect and TalkShopLive – experienced higher engagement and conversion than average benchmarks for the Walmart Live livestream service.
These included 86% higher total viewership, 30% higher average watch time, two times higher conversions, and over 1 million media views leveraging cut-down livestream content9 As a result of the success of these initial tests, Walmart Connect is extending TalkShopLive livestream testing opportunities to more advertisers.
“At Walmart Connect, we are constantly searching for new ways to create meaningful connections between brands and our customers wherever discovery and purchase happens,” Yam said in the blog post. “We create highly personalized shopping experiences designed to make it easier for customers to discover the right product at the right price and the right time.