Walmart to Acquire Vibe.co to Expand Self-Serve Connected TV Ads for Retail Media

The acquisition of the platform designed for small- and mid-sized businesses speaks to the evolution of streaming TV advertising.

Walmart is paying a reported $1.4bn for a connected-TV ad startup worth $410m nine months ago. The price tells you how far retailers will now go to catch Amazon in advertising. Walmart has agreed to buy Vibe.co, a connected-TV advertising platform. Two reports peg the deal at $1.4bn. It would be the retailer’s biggest acquisition […] This story continues at The Next Web

The deal would bring Vibe’s 10,000 SME advertisers to the platform, equipping Walmart to better compete with Meta and Pinterest.

Walmart is acquiring self-serve connected-TV ad platform Vibe.co for a reported $1.4 billion, adding it to an advertising ecosystem that already includes smart-TV maker Vizio. AdExchanger reports: On Tuesday, Walmart announced that it is buying Vibe.co, the French self-serve ad platform that specializes in helping small brands buy streaming commercials with similar ease and precision as they get from search and social. Vibe has been vying for a bigger share of the ad dollars moving to connected TV, especially in the US, as evidenced by the company's ubiquitous billboards in major cities including New York and San Francisco. Now, Vibe joins Walmart Connect's commerce ecosystem alongside the smart TV maker Vizio. And Vibe's tech is poised to help unify Walmart's growing CTV footprint with the closed-loop attribution provided by its retail sales data. [...] Together, Walmart and Vibe.co strive to "build the best ecosystem for the performance TV market," Vibe CEO and Co-Founder Arthur Querou told AdExchanger. Performance CTV has a high ceiling for growth. The performance budgets dedicated for streaming platforms are still small potatoes compared to search and social, Querou said. Only one-quarter of CTV ad campaigns have lower-funnel objectives, and that number has been static for years, according to data from Advertiser Perceptions. Now that Walmart owns both Vibe and Vizio, advertisers should have an easier time tying streaming campaigns to shopper data. That promise stands to win Walmart more marketing dollars earmarked for retail media and streaming behemoths -- including Amazon. Walmart is especially interested in attracting more small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who lack the tools, budgets or teams to invest in streaming TV, a Walmart spokesperson told AdExchanger. Other ad platforms, including MNTN and Magnite, have likewise targeted SMB advertisers as a source for continued growth in the CTV market. By adding Vibe.co, Walmart can court SMBs with the pitch that its new self-serve tools will make it easier for them to execute CTV campaigns. Plus, SMBs tend to prioritize performance campaigns, since they are under more pressure to justify tighter ad budgets and thus have to be more selective about which platforms they advertise on. And Walmart is better positioned than most platforms to prove its ads drove performance thanks to its retail data foundation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart plans to expand access to connected TV advertising by acquiring Vibe.co. By acquiring Vibe.co’s self-serve, connected TV advertising platform and integrating it into the Walmart Connect commerce media platform, the retailer aims to make TV advertising more accessible to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and mid-market advertisers, including its third-party marketplace sellers, Walmart said in a Tuesday […] The post Walmart Plans Vibe.co Acquisition to Court Smaller Advertisers appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Walmart is one of the nation’s more prominent advertisers, but, increasingly, it’s looking to become a bigger sell of advertising as well. The retailing giant, which offers video-advertising inventory around its stores and via its Vizio TV-manufacturing unit, said Tuesday that it intends to acquire Vibe.co, a platform that allows advertisers to buy and create […]