For several months, Walmart has shown its intentions to become a major player in the advertising industry and these intentions could materialize today.
And it is that recently the brand announced that Walmart DPS will debut during the second half of October just in time for the holiday shopping season.
As we know, DPS are platforms where advertisers bid for the inventory of different ad exchanges impression by impression and always bidding on the one that interests the advertiser the most.
Thanks to a collaboration with ad tech company The Trade Desk, Walmart will now have its own service on this which could be a game changer.
Rich Lehrfeld, executive vice president of Walmart’s media business, said Walmart DSP “combines best-in-class technology and The Trade Desk performance with the robust scale of Walmart’s unmatched first-party omnichannel data.”
With this launch it is expected that the brand will be able to expand its offering in external media for advertisers with the promise of reaching audiences more precisely with previous Walmart purchases and predictive audience segments, as well as buying behavior to brand level in the retailer’s physical and digital stores.
In addition, this new proposal will allow brands to access The Trade Desk inventory, which includes screens, video, mobile devices, audio and CTV.
What makes this proposal unique is the linking of own and third-party data sets.
In the words of the Walmart executive, the idea is “to be able to bring your own and third-party data, to be able to combine it with our own data to be able to target customers, that had not been done before,” as he referred to Adweek.
With this long-awaited launch, Walmart could accelerate the development of a business that would have already shown signs of growth.
Since launching this self-service interface a year ago, Walmart has seen a 56 percent increase in search queries, a 185 percent growth in sponsored products, and a 10-fold year-over-year growth in the number of “advertisers assets”.
In a timely manner, Walmart Connect (the retailer’s global advertising platform) as a whole is estimated to be a nearly $ 1 billion business.
Walmart has successfully expanded its ad inventory to include experiences such as in-store televisions and 170,000 self-checkout screens and continues to focus on developing digital advertising opportunities on its website and app.
Although the figures are favorable, the truth is that it is difficult to speak of a great new competitor for large digital advertising platforms.
In fact, the retailer is far from catching up with Amazon in this area. Amazon has posted 64 percent growth in its advertising revenue to top $ 7.95 billion by the fourth quarter of 2020.
However, it is an interesting setting that could favor the retailer’s plans in a field where, again, it faces one of its main rivals.
Recall that Walmart plans to grow its advertising business more than 10 times in the next five years.
For some time, Reuters reported that Walmart’s annual advertising revenue was expected to be nearly $ 1 billion in 2020.