Advertising may be just a fraction of Walmart’s overall revenue – but it’s a nerve center for growth. One might wonder why advertising and other businesses that appear marginal to Walmart’s current revenue makeup, such as third-party online marketplace sellers and subscription memberships, are front and center for the company right now.
DTC brands are struggling to get by without the Facebook ad engine. Legacy brands are flummoxed by ecommerce. One company that’s hoping to split the difference is RoC Skincare, which spun out of Johnson & Johnson and was acquired by the private equity firm Gryphon in 2018.
There’s a disconnect between those ad buyers in the trenches of online advertising and their own corporate leaders up the C-suite, who are accustomed to determining marketing group budgets based on ROI and other basic advertising KPIs that, frankly, are going haywire right now. One way to deal with that disconnect is to add someone who speaks both languages, as it were.
Commerce and creator monetization are Pinterest’s two main priorities right now, said Jeremy King, the company’s SVP and head of engineering. King, who is also the former CTO of Walmart’s ecommerce business – he joined Pinterest in 2019 – said that the convergence of creator revenue potential with social media-based shopping and product discovery by consumers “will make Pinterest functional, versus purely inspirational.”
“We saw the rise and fall that can happen if you’re dependent on digital advertising,” said Bryan Porter, Simple Modern’s co-founder and chief ecommerce officer. “It worked really well for us … until it didn’t.” The experience of surfing an online ad wave and then crashing hard on the beach has shaped Simple Modern’s marketing strategy, which is fully in-housed
Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.
The grocery chain Albertsons in-housed its advertising services and tech business in February, and is still making big changes to the group. “It’s really about owning the tech stack and the product vision,” said Evan Hovorka, head of retail media products.
Sam’s Club, the membership-based retailer owned by Walmart, recently rebranded its advertising business as the Member Access Platform (MAP) as it charts its own course alongside other emerging retail media platforms. The notion of “member access” is what sets Sam’s Club apart from other retailers that are focused entirely on advertising as a way to monetize customers, said Lex Josephs, a VP at Sam’s Club and GM of the MAP business.
Marriott is one among a platoon of non-advertising companies that have launched programmatic ad platforms lately. Just don’t call Marriott’s new platform a retail media network. “I wouldn’t put us in that category,” said Elizabeth Donovan, global director and head of ad revenue for the Marriott Media Network. “We are a travel media network and I think more like a publisher, too.”
Mike Schott joined Volta, which makes electric car charging stations, almost six years ago to build out the company’s nascent advertising business. That makes Volta early to the everything-is-an-ad platform trend. But even back in 2016, Schott, a longtime EV owner himself with a background in ad tech – he’s the former VP of sales for DSP Viant – had the sense that “an advertising business would be a strong differentiator.”
Google announced the latest updates to its shopping ad products at Google Marketing Live on Tuesday, with changes on the backend to how advertisers use its tech and on the consumer side. These changes are becoming more necessary as the mobile Google Search feed evolves from primarily text-based responses to more visual elements on the […]
Amazon disappointed investors with a $3.8 billion net loss in Q1 this year, its first quarterly loss in the past six years, plus online sales ticked down 1%. Amazon Advertising, however, did not disappoint. “Advertising revenue was up 25% year over year, and that’s a strong run rate compared to the revenue growth rate,” CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors.
There’s no time to stop and shop when there’s so much to test and learn. Unless, of course, you’re Stop & Shop. The northeastern US grocery chain is four years into a program to expand its ecommerce marketing and first-party data capabilities. But it still feels like early innings, considering how much change has happened […]
