Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
It might be a game changer for the industry, but good luck trying to buy a cocktail with a Walmart ID.
Walmart is flexing its first-party muscle by rolling out a demand-side platform, Walmart DSP, that allows advertisers to leverage its customer data for campaigns. It will be operational this October.
- Walmart’s offering is built upon ad tech firm The Trade Desk’s infrastructure, matching the retailer’s shopper information with the scale of one of the largest DSPs in the biz.
“It’s all first-party data. So we look at our data, we append an ID on to it, we are looking at a post-cookie world,” Rich Lehrfeld, SVP at Walmart Connect, the company’s media business, told Ad Age.
- Quite conveniently, The Trade Desk is pitching publishers and advertisers on its own third-party cookie replacement, Unified ID 2.0.
Through The Trade Desk, advertisers will be able to reach Walmart customers and audience segments outside Walmart’s own e-commerce platform.
Why this matters: Walmart knows a lot about its shoppers—150+ million of them weekly, both in-store and online.
As third-party cookies disappear, marketers are hungry for first-party data to reach the right customers at the right time. That’s partly why Target, Kroger, CVS, and most famously, Amazon have all ramped up their advertising platforms over the past couple of years.
Bottom line: “Retailers have woken up to the realization that the data they have about audiences and consumers is extremely valuable. They’re eager to monetize that data for everything it’s worth,” Eric Schmitt, an analyst at Gartner, told Marketing Brew.—RB