Walmart Owns The Screens And The Data. It Just Bought The Login.

Walmart said Tuesday it has agreed to acquire Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform, and bring it inside Walmart Connect. The deal is subject to the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust waiting period, terms were not disclosed, and Walmart expects it to close by the end of fiscal 2027 with no change to its current sales or operating income guidance. Vibe.co’s co-founders, CEO Arthur Querou and CTO Franck Tetzlaff, along with their team, are expected to join Walmart Connect once the deal closes.

Vibe.co was built for one kind of advertiser: the performance marketer who wants to run streaming TV the way they run paid social. Founded in 2022, the platform lets an advertiser pick from more than 500 channels, set audience targets, build a spot in an AI creative tool called Vibe Studio, and measure the campaign against sales, with no agency and no media team in the loop. The company says more than 10,000 marketers now use it, up from the roughly 5,000 brands it cited when it raised a $50 million Series B last September at a $410 million valuation. Querou has called the company the “Meta for TV advertising,” a pitch built on low entry cost and outcome measurement rather than the broad reach that has long defined television buying. What Walmart is buying is not only the technology but an existing base of small and mid-sized advertisers already running self-serve streaming campaigns.

Every CTV Route Walmart Built So Far Needed A Professional To Run It

Walmart has spent recent years assembling the parts of a connected TV business, and until now every one of them required a professional buyer to operate. It paid roughly $2.3 billion for VIZIO, whose SmartCast operating system and more than 19 million active accounts moved in house when the deal closed in December 2024. It launched a standalone demand-side platform with The Trade Desk in 2021, and this spring it opened access to its data on outside platforms for the first time, routing VIZIO inventory through Yahoo’s DSP using Magnite’s supply-side technology and extending its audiences into Google’s Display & Video 360. Each of those is a programmatic route an agency or an in-house media team buys through. What Walmart did not own was the other end: a self-serve interface where an advertiser with no media team logs in and launches a streaming campaign directly. Vibe supplies that interface, and connects it to the one asset Vibe could never build alone, Walmart’s first-party purchase data and the closed-loop measurement that ties a streaming impression to a sale across Walmart’s stores and site.

Advertising Is Now A Margin Engine, And Walmart Just Aimed It At The Smallest Buyers

Walmart reported that its advertising business grew 37% globally in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, and it said on the earnings call that its third-party Marketplace sellers grew their advertising spend by more than 50% over the same period, faster than the ad business overall. A day before the Vibe announcement, at Cannes Lions, Walmart said it would align its U.S., international, and Sam’s Club advertising under a shared commerce media strategy led by Chief Growth Officer Seth Dallaire, and renamed the Sam’s Club Member Access Platform as Sam’s Club Connect. The Vibe deal extends that build toward the smallest advertisers, and it lands in a category every large platform is now racing into. Roku sells streaming through a self-serve ads manager, and Amazon ties its own shopper data to connected TV, part of a broader convergence of retail data and streaming that ran through this year’s NewFronts. What sets Walmart’s entry apart is the pairing of a self-serve front door with first-party purchase data, and a built-in pool of advertisers already selling on its marketplace.

For First-Party Brands It Is A Convenience. For Marketplace Sellers It Is Closer To A New Channel.

The release names third-party Marketplace sellers as intended beneficiaries, and that is where the news carries the most weight. Large first-party suppliers already reach VIZIO and offsite CTV through Connect’s managed service, their agencies, and the Walmart DSP, so an owned self-serve tool is a convenience for them rather than a capability they lacked. The SMB and mid-market end of the Marketplace base is different. Many of those sellers have never run a television campaign, and a low-minimum self-serve platform wired to Walmart’s purchase data is closer to a channel they could not previously access than a new feature on one they already used. Those sellers already buy self-serve search ads on Walmart’s own properties, so a self-serve CTV product extends a buy-it-yourself motion they know from onsite out to streaming.

None of this is available to buy yet. The deal still has to clear the antitrust waiting period, and Walmart does not expect it to close until the end of fiscal 2027, which runs into early next year. In announcing it, Walmart said the combined operation will keep working with the broadcasters, publishers, supply-side platforms, and measurement providers already in its ecosystem, and framed the acquisition as widening advertiser choice rather than narrowing it. That leaves the existing Trade Desk, Yahoo, Magnite, Google, and VIZIO routes in place alongside whatever self-serve product eventually ships under the Walmart Connect name.

Winning With Walmart

Winning With Walmart is an independent platform for suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts.

Articles are developed by staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners.

Some are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools and are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by Winning With Walmart editors before publication.

Editorial judgment, sourcing decisions, and final approval rest with the publication's human editors in every case.

We are committed to accuracy and fairness. If you believe this article contains an error, we welcome your feedback.