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Everyone wants in the $60 billion that average retail sales It is planned to do so in 2025, according to Emarketer. For many agencies, retailers and adtech companies, this means striking deals with other players to reach new audiences and data on what people buy.
As we close out 2024, ADWEEK asked three industry executives and analysts which partners were the most significant in reshaping the landscape of sales and business media this year.
Walmart’s big CTV play: acquiring Vizio
In February, Walmart announced its acquisition of TV maker Vizio in a deal that is expected to strengthen the retailer’s advertising business, Walmart Connect. The purchase of $ 2.3 closed in December.
The move gives Walmart access to Vizio’s SmartCast Operating System, which has more than 18 million accounts. That data, combined with Walmart’s first-party data and Vizio’s ability to tell what people are watching with its automatic content recognition technology, could create the foundation for a closed-loop system to compete with Amazon.
“The video piece was missing,” said Andrew Lipsman, an independent retail media analyst. “[Getting] access to the TVs themselves, which are integration points for all content and advertising experiences, is strategically important. But it’s also direct access to a good portion of the CTV inventory, so they can accelerate that ambition much sooner than they would have been able to if they had tried to build it organically.”
A question on the minds of media buyers: Will Walmart keep Vizio’s ACR data to itself?
“[That] it would be a pretty big shock to the system,” Steven Frey, director of planning at Noble People, told ADWEEK. Currently, advertisers are able to use that data to inform their CTV strategy across the ecosystem.
“If they do more than one exclusive data set, it would increase the value of Walmart Connect’s inventory quite a bit,” he continued. “[It would] make the case for the value that can be sustained in that ecosystem.”
Publicis continues its buying spree with Mars United Commerce
Publicis has spent the last five years scouting and acquiring companies to create a media powerhouse. The company acquired Epsilon in 2019, CitrusAd in 2021, Profitero in 2022, and later. Mars United Commerce in September.
