Walmart Connect, the retailer’s ad tech platform, announced new strategic partnerships with TikTok, Snap and Roku to measure how social media and connected TV advertising affect sales. Meanwhile, Walmart also is developing live shoppable video on its own website to experiment with ahead of the holidays.
Seth Dallaire, Walmart’s chief revenue officer, said that the retailer is working with TikTok, Snap and Roku to help with “audience targeting and post-exposure measurement.”
Walmart is providing this new service for select brands, including Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, L’Oreal and Samsung. The program is not automated within Walmart Connect’s self-serve advertising platform. Instead, it is a managed service where brands get reports about how ad campaigns on TikTok, Snap and Roku influenced sales. The program also aims to help the brands buy media on TikTok, Snap and Roku, ad buys that can be targeted using Walmart Connect data.
“Social media, in most cases, is not closing the transaction,” Dallaire said in a phone interview this week. “There is a desire from brands and media publishers to understand, are consumers actually reacting to this advertising by completing a purchase or engaging with it in some way.”
Walmart is developing new ad units for the brands that can run on the social media sites, and it is able to use its consumer information to help target ads outside of Walmart.com. At the same time, Walmart is working with TalkShopLive and Firework, both live video commerce platforms, to produce online sales programming on Walmart.com.