Scott's Thoughts
Scott’s Thoughts offers weekly insights from retail expert Scott Benedict on leadership, innovation, and industry trends. Explore topics like AI ethics, workplace professionalism, and global trade dynamics to stay ahead in the evolving retail landscape.
Scott's Thoughts
Walmart vs Amazon: Battle for Your Smart TV Shopping Experience
The retail media landscape is transforming dramatically as major players make strategic moves to control the space where viewing meets buying. Walmart's recent $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio has created a powerful new ecosystem that combines the retailer's extensive shopper data with Vizio's SmartCast operating system and its 18 million active accounts. This bold move enables advertisers to create truly shoppable TV experiences where consumers can make purchases directly through their remote controls while watching advertisements.
Meanwhile, Amazon has taken a different approach by forging an exclusive partnership with Roku that provides access to approximately 80 million smart TV households. This collaboration allows advertisers to place ads across both Roku's channel and Amazon's Fire TV platform, with all purchase activity flowing through Amazon's established e-commerce infrastructure. The contrasting strategies highlight fascinating differences in how these retail giants approach the integration of media and commerce.
What's particularly intriguing is how these developments signal a fundamental shift in the consumer purchase journey. Walmart seems to be playing a long game, building comprehensive ownership and integration between viewing and purchasing experiences, providing advertisers with exceptional visibility into conversion pathways. Amazon's partnership approach delivers massive scale without requiring the significant capital investment of an acquisition. Both strategies point to a future where other retail media networks will need to develop their own approaches to smart TV integration or risk being left behind in this rapidly evolving landscape. Which approach will ultimately prove more successful? The answer may reshape how we all shop from our living rooms for years to come.
Looking to reach customers at the moment when consideration turns to purchase? The smart TV in your customers' living rooms is becoming retail media's most powerful new frontier. Explore how your brand can leverage these emerging platforms.
Well, hello everyone, I'm Scott Benedict. One of the developments in our industry that I've been watching with a lot of interest recently has been the evolution in the retail media space and, more specifically, the increased leverage of smart TV platforms as a touchpoint in retail media campaigns, has a touch point in retail media campaigns and there's been some really interesting events take place here in the last six months in that space. Now, if you haven't heard, last fall or late last year, walmart closed on a $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio and that brought Vizio's SmartCast operating system on its smart TVs and about 18 million active accounts into Walmart Connect's inventory of connected TV inventory and married Walmart shopper data with Vizio's reach of their smart TV platform, the smart cast platform. That really provides advertisers an opportunity to build shoppable TV ads. That allows purchases to take place via a TV remote, and some of those test programs are already out there and visible to shoppers and it's really been an interesting new way to reach shoppers right at the point in which they're watching an ad and contemplating a purchase. Now, more recently here in just the last few weeks, amazon and smart TV platform Roku have announced an exclusive partnership that grants Amazon's ad platform access to about 80 million smart TV households through Roku's platform, and that's going to be an interesting thing to watch, because now advertisers can not only buy ads on Roku's channel but also on Amazon's Fire TV, and all of those purchases obviously lead to Amazon's purchase platform.
Speaker 0:So different approaches in both cases.
Speaker 0:Walmart, in their case, actually did an acquisition with Vizio, whereas Amazon's approach was that of a partnership with Roku, and so different ways of accomplishing the same goal have been different between the two companies. Now the implications of all this is that it looks like Walmart is playing a long game and building full integration between viewing and purchase on a platform that they own, and it's really ideal for connecting all the dots for advertisers through to a purchase conversion, and so there's great visibility there for advertisers. But there's also a lot of regulatory potential opportunities there that we'll have to continue to watch. Amazon, by contrast, has used the partnership approach and delivers a pretty massive scale in their program and doesn't require as much of an investment on their part. But it will be interesting to see which of these approaches turns out to be the most successful. My guess is is for various reasons, they'll both be very successful and, if anything, it will point to other retail media platforms that need to develop their own strategy for exploiting smart TVs and digital shopping platforms in a new and different ways. That's what I've been reading and thinking about.
Speaker 0:I'm Scott Benedict.