Walmart Completes Acquisition of VIZIO
After the federally mandated expiration period, Walmart’s acquisition of Television giant VIZIO was finalized this week. VIZIO produces high-quality televisions, no question, but the real news is how this will impact Walmart’s advertising business. SmartCast, the OS inside VIZIO’s smart TVs, currently boasts over 19 million active accounts, up 400% from 2018.
Our Take: This will undoubtedly be an example of “The result being greater than the sum of its parts.” Nineteen million accounts, and growing, is considerable. The amount of user data that will feed into Walmart’s robust advertising infrastructure will prove invaluable and can likely give Walmart a competitive edge against Amazon with their STV capabilities.
Walmart will likely heavily invest in this, keeping VIZIO televisions at affordable prices and integrating the SmartCast operation system into its name-brand TV sets, “ONN,” once its contract with Roku ends. Keep an eye on SmartCast’s growth over the next few quarters; it will be the main indicator of how Walmart’s big bet is shaking out.
Early Cyber 5 Findings – Sales Increase 5.7%
Cyber 5 data continues to be analyzed, but early sales results are in: eCommerce growth continues to grow steadily. The 5.7% increase might seem like a moderate increase from last year, but considering Amazon’s early launch of “Black Friday Week” could have stolen the thunder from Cyber 5, the sales velocity remained.
Cyber Monday brought in some interesting statistics, with year-over-year increases of 2% domestically and 3% globally, slightly under the average growth of Cyber 5. Notably, mobile sales accounted for 57% of Cyber 5 activity, a 13.3% increase YoY. This trend isn’t exactly surprising, but the devil is in the details: Mobile was decidedly more popular than desktop and saw double-digit growth. Optimize for mobile, folks.
2024 Cyber 5 Saw Fewer # of Shoppers
Is it a contradiction you’re seeing? Not quite. Even though year-over-year sales increased by average spend, the number of shoppers decreased throughout Cyber 5, according to the National Retail Federation, accounting for combined online and offline sales.
Whether or not Amazon’s “Black Friday Week” contributed to this is unclear. It will take some additional time (and data analysis) to determine why fewer shoppers were active this time around.
Our Take: Don’t over-analyze the overall market, even though keeping an eye on macro trends is still important. Understanding your own category is most important for marketers and eCommerce managers, since changes to shopper behavior can vary drastically between different verticals. As more niche sales events inevitably launch in 2025, make sure you’re looking at the right data before adapting your advertising strategy or media mix.
Amazon Improves DSP Efficiencies
With Amazon advertising is constantly improving, it’s easy to miss a more technical advancement like what was just announced – the Dynamic Traffic Engine(Beta). Make sure to read the full announcement for details, but put simply, this new feature gives a much-needed “tune-up” in the communication between Amazon’s DSP and their network of Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs). Oftentimes, SSPs struggle to identify best what traffic to send to send to buyers and DSPs, which leads to unnecessary requests and inefficient advertising.
The Dynamic Traffic Engine, as a “traffic signal sharing and shaping tool,” allows buyers to send “low demand” or “high demand” signal recommendations in advance, has already shown some promising results: Low demand ad requests sent to Amazon Ads from an SSP were reduced by 40%. This tool looks to be a boon for both DSP users and SSPs, and another notch on the belt of Amazon Ads.
Can Retail Media “Cover” for Performance?
In an analysis piece from CampaignAsia this week, the impact of retail media on the greater media ecosystem once again comes into question. However, in a refreshing change of pace for those who have been in retail media for a while, they don’t question retail media’s efficacy but its capacity.
By extrapolating trends from Criteo’s Q3 earnings, and citing headwinds from privacy regulations, writer Matthew Keegan notes “Alarming declines” for retargeting and performance advertising. Criteo’s performance media segment, growing by only 5% year-over-year, paled in comparison to 23% growth from retail media.
Our Take: It’s important to take a step back and look at everything holistically. Creating the perfect marketing mix will require more cross-pollination between “performance” and “retail media,” so much so that, in some ways, I would look to reject the framing of this conversation altogether. Retail Media isn’t “covering” performance marketing; it’s mixing into it.
As incrementality tools become more robust and data-clean rooms find their sweet spot, it will become progressively less important to draw the lines of where each media type begins and ends. -section of television and retail media. Sprinkle in the use of AI, and it’s clear: We’re living in the future now!
