Retail media is breaking out of the digital shopping aisle. For years, the category has been synonymous with sponsored product listings and banner ads on a retailer’s own website or app. Now, however, the strategy is expanding to find customers wherever they are spending their time.
That means following shoppers to the connected TV in their living room, the social media feeds on their phones, and the audio streams in their ears.
For Walmart Connect, building this off-site ecosystem has been a key focus, from launching its own demand-side platform to integrating with major social and CTV publishers. “The world’s largest retailers for the better part of the last 10 years have been building pretty robust off-site offerings,” said Ryan Mayward, svp, retail media sales, Walmart Connect, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Connecting the customer journey
He claimed that the more channels a brand uses to reach a consumer, the better its sales performance will be. It is a philosophy that moves beyond optimizing a single channel in isolation.
“When a brand is doing sponsored search in the Walmart shopping app, as well as display, and then doing offsite display, social, CTV, they’re going to sell more products at Walmart to Walmart customers than, say, an advertiser that’s maybe doing one or two of those tactics,” Mayward said, adding this has been demonstrated across categories including food, consumables, general merchandise, and fashion.
The foundation for that omnichannel approach is closed loop measurement. He described an ability to connect ad exposure to purchasing behavior, whether online or in one of Walmart’s thousands of physical stores. “We have different ways of dimensionalizing what each format and channel is contributing to a campaign,” he added, citing data that showed advertisers running CTV and search campaigns concurrently saw 34% more new-to-brand buyers than those using search alone.
A new role for the national media budget
As retail media networks expand their reach far beyond their own properties, Mayward argued it should compel advertisers to rethink how they allocate their budgets. He contended that the relatively small amount of time consumers spend actively shopping pales in comparison to the hours they spend on other digital activities.
“They’re watching TV, they’re watching short form video, scrolling social feeds, gaming,” Mayward said. “For a retailer that reaches most Americans, we’re able to go out and find Walmart customers… and invite them to come back to Walmart to buy products from our brands.”
This capability to connect upper-funnel brand advertising with lower-funnel sales outcomes should make marketers reconsider the role of their national media spend, in Mayward’s view. “I think it really compels brands to ask, ‘Why am I not doing more of this with my national media budget?’” he said. “We even have measurement techniques that quantify how much sales we’re driving at other retailers. And so we’re showing a complete picture of sales impact from all these different channels.”
