How Walmart will work with TikTok, Snap and Roku to measure shopping ads online

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. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Agency A-List winners here Walmart has been developing its ad platform to compete with Amazon, which also has invested in live shopping programs on its website. Amazon also has a creator program that allows its roster of talent to stream sales events, which are most prominent during holidays and Prime Day. Social media companies, especially TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snap, Pinterest and Twitter, have been trying to capture more commerce. But social commerce has been progressing slowly and there have been setbacks with how far the platforms can go to accommodate online shopping. For instance, TikTok’s livestream shopping program has reportedly been mothballed after having trouble catching on in the U.K. Facebook is pulling the plug on live shopping next month. The platforms still consider themselves important players in product discovery, and Walmart’s new partnership with TikTok and Snap shows that they are trying to prove that ads viewed on their apps do lead to sales. “That’s why we’ve been able to partner with them, because of that interest,” Dallaire said, “in a media environment where there’s more and more emphasis on attribution, and understanding the return on those media investments.” The partner program, so far, is a very hands-on offering, where the brands get custom reporting about their campaigns, based on activations on Walmart.com’s live shopping, TikTok, Snap and Roku. Dallaire, however, could see the program expanding to the point where it would be more automated and widely available within Walmart Connect, so brands could better target ads on social media and connected TV, and measure those outcomes. Walmart already has a close partnership with Roku. At Cannes this summer, Walmart and Roku discussed their new “shoppable ad” deal that lets viewers buy products featured in commercials on the streaming TV platform.

How Walmart will work with TikTok, Snap and Roku to measure shopping ads online

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