Yahoo! announced a strategic, multi-year relationship for online display and video advertising with Walmart.com. This agreement enables Walmart.com to leverage Yahoo!’s advertising platform to present new offers to online customers. Yahoo! also becomes the exclusive portal to resell Walmart.com’s display inventory.Our take:
Yahoo! will bring its extensive network of leading brand advertisers to Walmart.com and serve as the primary marketing and sales channel for the site's display and video advertising. Yahoo! will also apply its industry-leading ad-serving, targeting and inventory management capabilities to power ad pricing, targeting, delivery and reporting for Walmart.com. The site will ultimately become a participant in AMP! from Yahoo!, the recently announced advertising management platform that will become available to publishers later this year.“This announcement builds on our strategy to be the partner of choice for leading brands looking to engage more customers with compelling offers online,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo! Publisher Network. "By combining Walmart.com’s leading position as a multi-channel retailer with our industry-leading display advertising sales and ad management technology and sales force, we will be able to provide advertisers with the easiest, most effective way to deliver targeted, relevant marketing messages to Walmart.com shoppers."
As AdAge pointed out, many take the announcement as a further sign of the blurring between retailer and media company. Wal-Mart has already been operating what is essentially the nation's fifth largest network -- Wal-Mart TV -- for many years now, though clearly it has been thought of as an advertising vehicle exclusively (well, ok, most of the other major networks seem to have the same mentalit nowadays). The deal with Yahoo! extends the retailer's own reach and audience size while giving Yahoo! access to Wal-Mart's already-enormous customer base.
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