Everyone wants to participate in the 60 billion dollars that retail media should be completed in 2025, according to Emarketer. For many agencies, retailers and ad tech companies, that means striking deals with other players to reach new audiences and gain new data on what people are buying.
As we close out 2024, ADWEEK asked three industry executives and analysts which partnerships have been most important in reshaping the retail and commerce media landscape this year.
Walmart’s big project on CTV: the acquisition of Vizio
In February, Walmart announced the acquisition of TV maker Vizio in a deal that is expected to strengthen the retailer’s advertising business, Walmart Connect. The acquisition at $2.3 closed in December.
The move gives Walmart access to Vizio’s SmartCast operating system, which has more than 18 million accounts. This data, combined with Walmart’s proprietary data and Vizio’s ability to learn what people are watching through its automatic content recognition technology, could lay the foundation for a closed-loop system to compete with Amazon.
“The video was lacking,” said Andrew Lipsman, an independent retail media analyst. “[Getting] access to the TVs themselves, which are integration points for all advertising content and experiences, is strategically important. But it’s also direct access to a good portion of CTV’s inventory, which allows them to accelerate this ambition much sooner than they could have if they had tried to build it in a way organic.
One question on media buyers’ minds: 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 this data to inform their CTV strategy across the entire ecosystem.
“If they made it a more proprietary data set, it would significantly increase the value of Walmart Connect inventory,” he continued. “[It would] advocate for the value that can be sustained in this ecosystem.
Publicis continues its buying spree with Mars United Commerce
Publicis has spent the past five years sourcing and acquiring companies to create a retail media powerhouse. The company acquired Epsilon in 2019, CitrusAd in 2021, Profitero in 2022, then Mars United Commerce in September.
These acquisitions allowed Publicis to leapfrog other holding companies, according to experts.
“If I’m in an agency holding company, I look at what Publicis has done in retail media and I say, ‘We’re going to be totally left behind if we don’t really look at some businesses.’ to strengthen our offering to the market,” said Sean Cheyney, Head of Retail Media at Vistar Media.
This is something that analysts, including Lipsman, have speculated and taken into account. Omnicom’s decision to acquire IPGbecause the two holding companies combined have a better chance of competing with Publicis for commercial advertising dollars.
“This Mars acquisition is going to flourish quite strongly in 2025,” Cheyney predicted.
Microsoft Shuts Down PromoteIQ, Reaches Deal With Criteo
Microsoft first acquisition of retail advertising startup PromoteIQ in 2019, signaling that it also wanted to profit from the retail media dollars Amazon was taking in.
However, in July, Microsoft and Criteo announced a new partnership with retail media. This deal seems to have overshadowed his work with PromoteIQ, in fact close retail media company, according to retail media observers.
The collapse of PromoteIQ created a frenzy among trading platforms competing for remaining business, Cheyney explained. This has prompted some retailers to rethink their overall retail media strategy, leading to the rise of tech companies such as Zitcha, Placement.io and Pentaleap, he continued.
These technology companies serve as a “one-stop shop” for retail media companies so that advertisers can more easily purchase on-premises, off-premises and in-store inventory.
“There may be several platforms [powering the backend]but for anyone interacting with the user interface, it feels like a ‘one-stop shop’ through which all purchases and reporting flow,” Cheyney explained.
Best Buy and CNET combine ad inventory and first-party data
In the first case, Lipsman predicts that there will be many such partnerships, Best Buy and CNET combined their advertising inventory and audiences in April.
“[It was] the first domino in this inevitable trend of partnerships between digital publishers and retail media networks,” Lipsman explained. It’s not just about running Best Buy ads in CNET’s content, he stressed, it’s also about bringing CNET’s content into stores in a way that aims to support in-person consumption experiences.
