Sam's Club hires Walmart's Lex Josephs to head Media Group

Sam’s Club has named Lex Josephs, who leads sales and ad tech partnerships for Walmart Connect, to head its Media Group as the club store looks to step from the shadow of its big corporate sibling to build its own data-fueled media business. Josephs will make the move effective Jan. 1 after more than three years at Walmart, where she helped unify what had been a sometimes disjointed operation and win support from the retailer’s powerful merchandising executives. Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis. Walmart Connect has grown rapidly—doubling revenue last year, with two-year growth of 240% as of the fiscal third quarter. But Chief Member Officer Tony Rogers said Sam’s Club Media Group is also among the fastest-growing media platforms in the U.S., tripling its own business in the past two years and increasing its number of advertisers from 200 to 350. Now Sam’s Club is looking to further fuel that growth by, among other things, preparing to launch its own demand-side platform in partnership with The Trade Desk, similar to what Walmart Connect did earlier this year, Rogers said. “Brands will be able to take the audience they’ve identified with us and export that to advertising other places on the web," Rogers said. Sam’s also recently moved its supplier data platform from a system operated by NielsenIQ to IRI Liquid Data, which previously handled data for Sam’s Media Group. That gives suppliers and advertisers a single platform to manage sales, merchandising, supply chain and media data, Rogers said. “You’ve got in one place all the analytics about how your business is doing and then an ability to go create target audiences and an ad campaign to drive your business further,” he said. Sam’s Club had U.S. sales of $63.9 billion last year, less than a fifth the size of Walmart’s $370 billion. But as a standalone entity it would be a top 10 U.S. retailer in its own right, based National Retail Federation data. As a membership club, Sam’s has full visibility into customer purchases, giving it a trove of first-party data unlike Walmart, which has a growing database from e-commerce but no loyalty program. Among U.S. retailers that have either membership or loyalty data covering nearly all their customer transactions, Sam’s is the sixth largest. Such first-party data has become increasingly important, helping drive retail media growth amid loss of personal identity data across many digital platforms and the impending loss of tracking cookies in Google’s ubiquitous Chrome browser. See Ad Age's 2021 Marketers of the Year here. Though Sam’s Club Media Group shares talent (evidenced by hiring Josephs) and best practices with Walmart Connect, it’s operationally separate, Rogers said. And while Walmart is on a roll, beating analyst expectations last quarter with U.S. comparable store sales growth of 9.2%, Sam’s Club is rolling even faster, with comp sales up 13.9%, its fifth straight quarter of double-digit growth. Rogers said that momentum stems in part from marketing efforts to help establish Sam’s unique identity from Walmart, including a new campaign from new agency VMLY&R. Hiring Josephs will help put Sam’s Club Media Group on a similar path, he said, “becoming a business, a brand and an advertising platform unto itself as opposed to a smaller part of a much larger Walmart enterprise.”

Sam's Club hires Walmart's Lex Josephs to head Media Group

Featured Stories