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Inside Walmart Connect: From Retail Media to Full-Funnel Performance with Khurrum Malik
00:19:57
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- [00:11]
A
Welcome to the Market Extra podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I am joined today by Kurum Malik, who is the VP of Business and Product Marketing for Walmart Connect. Kurum, thank you for being here.
- [00:22]
B
Ari. Excited to be here. First time caller, longtime listener.
- [00:25]
A
Yeah, exactly. And Walmart fits in that category as well. It's a topic I think probably a lot of our listeners want to hear hear as one of the most important companies in commerce. So you've been there, you've been at Walmart Connect for about a year. You had a pretty long established ad tech bonafides at ias, Meta, other places like that. So what made you join Walmart Connect?
- [00:48]
B
Yeah, thanks, Ari, for having me. So, yeah, I'm the VP of Business Product Marketing at Walmart Connect and like you mentioned, I'm too old to kind of admit it, but 20 plus years in tech and media and I love the space. If you love to learn, and you love to learn every day and be humbled every day, it's the best industry to be in, right? Yeah. So being a PM at Microsoft, PMM at Meta, and most recently CMO at is, it was a great bedrock and foundation. But what brought me here is kind of a fun part of the story is I saw at Connect kind of this one to ten opportunity to grow beyond the retail media business we have today to full funnel stack. But the thing that a lot of people I chat with is the culture. And having been around tech and media like you have, I think like the bookends of kindness and humility with a white hot desire to win are rare. The white hot desire to win and serve is everywhere.
- [01:47]
A
Right, okay.
- [01:48]
B
But what I really enjoy is the kindness, humility, balance. And then, you know, I spent seven years of my life in Charlotte Hill, Virginia and Bentonville connected for me. So I spent a lot of time going to Bentonville, which is home base, even though we're based out of Hoboken. So that was my, my big draw, really the big opportunity. But I also just like the culture, just really, you know, I, I just appreciate a place where kindness and winning are not mutually exclusive.
- [02:14]
A
Sure. I've never been to Bentonville. I hear they have really nice museums because of the, because the. Gotta go to the Walton family.
- [02:20]
B
You gotta come. You gotta got to come. You'll be surprised. Some people say it's like mini Austin, but, you know, we'll leave that as it may.
- [02:28]
A
All right, sure. So paint a picture for us about like, factually, what is Walmart Connect at this point? Where's the. Where's the line around Walmart Connect versus the rest of Walmart. What's in, what's out.
- [02:40]
B
Yeah, for sure. So you know Walmart Connect is a business unit within greater Walmart. We're a retail media platform. We're really built to spark sales for advertisers. We serve the biggest enterprise advertisers and the agencies in the ecosystem, but also the smaller ones, increasingly emerging advertisers. We offer search, display, video, now CTV with Vizio as well. And we do that both on site and off site and it's a growing business for us. It's a multibillion dollar business growing at 30 plus percent and we're excited but that is really a function of the impact really are trying to drive for our advertisers. So that's Walmart Connect in a nutshell. Home base for the US is in Hoboken, right across the river here. I can see good old Manhattan, which is the most beautiful view. You should come visit sometime.
- [03:38]
A
Yeah, sure. So that was because the origin of the Hoboken office, it was an acquisition, right? It was a. I can't remember. Diapers.com. am I confused? So, so I think probably we think retail media. The first thing you think about is search. So it's a PLA product listing ads that are SKU targeted. And I was actually just on another podcast where I was making the point that that's pretty easy business, right. You know, you know who the advertiser is, you know what the customer wants. Just show them the ad. Tell me, am I wrong or is pla, you know, an important, exciting, dynamic place to be?
- [04:16]
B
Yeah. In fact, to prepare for this, Ari, I listened. I think it's the Middleman podcast.
- [04:21]
A
The Middleman podcast, Yeah.
- [04:23]
B
I enjoyed it. I was listening to it yesterday and finished off this morning. So I mean, yeah, if you want to simplify it, there it is. But let me kind of zoom out about the overall story for Connect and Ensure. Plas and search ads are a big part of it. So if you just step back, we are a full stack retail media platform and our DNA is search advertising plas that you mentioned. Right. And what, what, what. What we're excited about is, is taking that and providing a full stack of solutions. So you know, kind of just for those that are new to Walmart Connect on your audience. You know, I always think about the who new campaign for Walmart to Consumer. If you think about the pricing and assortment that's there, there's a little bit of who knew for Walmart Connect and all the Things we can do beyond pla. So let me just share a couple of those.
- [05:13]
A
Yep.
- [05:13]
B
So first is like, you know, we've got the scale. A lot of folks may not know we have 150 million weekly customers across digital and physical footprint, 4600 stores in the US we think about brand and performance solutions. We're known for our performance solutions. Right. The lower funnel solutions, search ads, and also we think about in store ads as a contextual moment to drive performance as well. But increasingly we're being asked to also play in the brand solutions space. Cross video, CTV display. The mental model that I like to talk about is how we've got a mechanism to help capture demand with search and plas. But then there's now an increasing demand for our advertisers to help them create demand. Our Visio investments, video investments, increasing or leaning into brand solutions. It's not just your PLAs, it's building off of that. And then of course we've got our measurement solutions. I think the thing that the reason we are growing is because we're enabling other people to grow. We have measurement solutions that it's all about from awareness, consideration, ROAS, all the ABCs. But increasingly we're being asked to talk about incrementality. So yes, we've got TLAs in search, but we got the scale, we got new portfolio of solutions we're excited about.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah.
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B
And we've got the signals to close loop it. So yeah, it's, it's, we're evolving but we've got, we know our core as well.
- [06:43]
A
Yeah, I didn't want to disparage people, say I was sort of setting it up as a strawman so we could talk about the more interesting things. So let's talk about, let's talk about Vizio. So you acquired the. Walmart acquired the TV manufacturer and it is as well an ad network, ad platform, measurement partner. So I assume Vizio is still just selling standalone to anyone who wants to buy ads. But talk about how it connects with what you said your vision was, which was helping advertisers sell more products.
- [07:13]
B
Yeah. A couple things let's go back to. Increasingly people are asking us, can you help us do both brand and performance, help us collapse the funnel? How can we get from couch to cart? That's where we want to go. We're excited about it. For example, right now, for the first time this holiday season, a lot of our advertisers have taken advantage of a holiday bundle that brought together Walmart.com homepage inventory with Visio's home screen with full campaign tracking from in flight performance to roas. Right. So we're starting to mix both our o&o on.com and search with Visio. So that's just like a pragmatic example, a brand that we're excited about. Celsius leveraged Vizio CTV recently to get 85% incremental reach unduplicated across their linear TV campaign. So those are the early days of what we're seeing today. It's only been a year since we brought Vizio into the fold, but we think the sight, sound in motion and getting to the couch and then turning that couch into a cart and into a conversion is something that we're well suited, suited to do in the early days.
- [08:26]
A
It sounds like a motto, couch to cart. So if I show, if I'm an advertiser and I show a sight, sound and motion TV ad to a consumer has a Vizio tv, am I getting insights as to how many of those folks actually bought my product? Is it a sample or are you giving them estimates on the total impact or what?
- [08:48]
B
Yeah, so we are providing conversion and interaction data from those campaigns. It's still early days at the level of precision we want to, but it's what one would expect from a ROAS and a Lyft perspective. But we're being asked increasingly to get precise and we've got to balance that. So we're excited about it. Again, it's only been one year.
- [09:10]
A
No, I get it, I get it.
- [09:11]
B
Yeah, but we're really excited about it. But I think it goes back to what I was saying about kind of who knew, right? If you, if you're a consumer, like who knew I could get delivery within three hours for 95 of the United States. But you know, for Walmart Connect, there's a little bit of that too. Like, oh, I didn't know I could invest in CTV both at Vizio and of course our Walmart DSP for off site ctv. So we're pretty excited about that. Yeah, it's still early days, but it's something that we'll be spending more time on.
- [09:40]
A
And, and the hot topic, one of the hot topics in CTV right now is performance TV this. And it's generally positioned as like, we're going to bring advertisers who are not TV advertisers using like programmatic techniques. How important is that to your strategy? Especially as you look at the smaller advertisers who sell products in Walmart but aren't national TV buyers.
- [10:04]
B
It's a great question. And so, you know, one of the things we talk a lot about here is like, what's the essence of what we do? Right. The essence of it. And the essence of it is sparking sales. And now let me bring it back to not the classic enterprise advertisers that we all know and are a can, but think about the emerging advertisers, the smaller mom and pop shops that are on the Walmart marketplace.
- [10:29]
A
Sure.
- [10:29]
B
And how we can help spark sales for them. So not only do we provide them with search today to spark sales, but our aspiration is to get them the ability to easily activate a CTV campaign with a focused window of time in said geography so that they can actually see sales. Or we call it GMV Lift right on our marketplace. So we're pretty excited about that. Again, very early days, not in the market today. But it's, you know, we talk about the demand side, supply side, platform. On the demand side. A new area for us is the emerging advertisers which we have thousands of, but we have aspirations to go further. So that's where we want to go with CTV and performance. And that's the bar that we want to have is like, are we driving GMV for an advertiser?
- [11:20]
A
Yeah, let's talk, you mentioned earlier measurement. So let's talk about measurement that's bundled in with the media and tell me about it. Does it incrementality? How does it work?
- [11:30]
B
Yep, yep. We've got all the things you would want. We got incrementality, we've got Media Mix and I think like the thing that, and I remember this from your earlier podcast too. Right. Which is when you talk about measurements, easy for platforms to talk about how great they are, but also like having accountability with the third parties. So we have partners that can prove the impact. Now it's easier to show sales right. As the biggest retailer in the United States and the impact there. But as we go into reach residents type campaigns, we're going to need to lean into third party partners increasingly. So I'm excited about, about that one. You didn't mention. Not only was I at ias, but dare I say, a really, really long time ago, galaxy far, far away. I was at comscore as well.
- [12:19]
A
Oh wow.
- [12:19]
B
And I know, you know that's, that's really old school digital media measurement, but it's just important to have third party partners to validate, verify the investments we make.
- [12:32]
A
Yeah, well, I think when you talk about retail media, the immediate concern is like, well, you know, they were going to buy that product anyway. So measurement becomes incrementality, and measurement is vitally important.
- [12:44]
B
100%. And so when we pivot over to some of the things we'll be doing at ces, I want to talk a little bit more about that. But, yeah, like, the thing that the bar is very high. Right. And I actually, I enjoy that. Like, hey, if you're putting capital in to Walmart Connect, what is the lift and impact you're having that you wouldn't have had before? Yeah. And one of the things, Ari, as we did for planning for next year, we listened to some of our CMOs of some of our biggest brands and also the chief sales officers who are running the distribution into the stores. Right. And it's interesting, they are increasingly being asked to work together. National TV budgets, distribution shopper, marketing budgets. Right.
- [13:30]
A
Yeah.
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B
And so it's like, okay, well, I'm the CFO or CEO. I'm like, this is capital. Move my product. Build brands, but make sure you drive sales. And so that's my long way of saying that the bar for driving sales and incremental sales is the things we want to aspire to and make happen. And so that. That the iroas, ROAS conversions, all that stuff is. Is the bar we want to. Want to push to.
- [14:00]
A
Got it. All right, so CES is coming up, and we're recording this in December, but it'll probably come out around then. So tell us about what you're announcing at ces.
- [14:11]
B
Yeah, so you know ces, man, I'm so glad they moved to week two. And do you remember the days when it was, like, literally January 3rd on the plane? I know architecture will be there, which will be a lot of fun. So there's three things I want to talk about for CES and kind of give an early preview to your listeners that week. So first is we'll be announcing the work we're doing on Agentic. We're very early days for AI and how we're going to make retail media smarter. There's really two things we'll be talking about at CES for consumers. It's our experiments with ads within Sparky, which is the consumer agent. So 81% of surveyed Walmart customers have used Sparky to check product availability and review specs before purchasing. And that's just tip of the iceberg. And we are testing new advertising environments and these new shopping surfaces. So we're excited about that.
- [15:11]
A
That's exciting.
- [15:12]
B
Also for advertisers, we have Marty, which is our new advertising assistant.
- [15:17]
A
You have Sparky and Marty.
- [15:19]
B
Sparky and Marty, right? Cute.
- [15:21]
A
All right. They're very cute.
- [15:22]
B
Yeah. Marty's in beta. And you know, some of the things we've learned is 97% of user queries are very unique. And so Marty is helping folks quickly make decisions about campaign reporting. And a lot of the SMBs are really using or emerging businesses are using. But it's exciting, it's making things easier. So one is going to be our gentic and how are we using AI to make retail media smarter? Two, we're going to announce the GA for search incrementality and we're going to be rolling that out to enterprise customers. As you're familiar with search incrementality, it's all about iroas. We'll do sales lift as well and early reads are strong with our clients, but we want to lean into that transparency. Right. And making search incrementality really a gold standard for what to expect from a true growth partner. Having worked and many, many other media platforms, I think this is like a gold standard to aim for. So we're excited about that. And the third one is just kind of early peek into it. We've done some third party research with NCS as well. We'll be announcing that during ces. So for example, at the food and consumables category, Walmart Connect outperforms both digital medium benchmarks for NCS and social benchmarks. So for digital media benchmarks, Walmart Connect is 2.8x stronger for ROAS and 2x higher sales lift. And then for again, social media, having been a social media person and it also was at Spotify a 2.5x ROAS advantage versus just social benchmarks. So we're going to be releasing a report that really shares that. So as you can see, we're leaning into innovation, but we don't want to lose the core of search and incrementality and also welcome third party partners. So we're pretty excited about it.
- [17:19]
A
Yeah, incrementality in search is a big deal because otherwise you don't know if your money's being double counted, wasted, et cetera. So that's exciting. And coming up with benchmarks is also pretty interesting because I think a lot of direct response oriented advertisers put social as the benchmark to either beat or usually not beat. So excited to hear all of that and I'm sure people will be saying hi to you in Vegas. Let's transition to our quick lightning round. So I'll give you a couple of quick Questions get somewhat quick answers. What is your number one business challenge?
- [17:55]
B
Clarity from complexity. Because we're being asked to drive sales and impact. I want to make sure. And our product teams want to make sure we're driving clear solutions to crisp problems. So think about the emerging markets and, sorry, the emerging advertiser. How do we make sure we're just driving GMB lift? So that's the big one. We have so many solutions. How do we focus to make true GMV impact?
- [18:20]
A
All right, and what is your number one competitive advantage?
- [18:25]
B
Number one competitive advantage that I'm excited about, and I know it's there, is the omnichannel footprint. I know that it's just like offline 4600 stores. I know we think that people are not going to go into stores and buy groceries and it's like everything's going to be just automatically delivered in a drone that flies into your window with a baked ham.
- [18:49]
A
Baked ham through the window.
- [18:51]
B
Right. The way that that is an advantage. Look, look, it's just like we are where people want to discover and shop.
- [18:57]
A
All right?
- [18:57]
B
And, you know, we take those signals and activate them across the solution stack.
- [19:01]
A
It's funny for people like me, media people based in New York, we just don't shop at Walmart because there aren't any in Manhattan or anywhere in New York City. I think it's one in Staten island, but I haven't been there. Come to Union, New Jersey.
- [19:11]
B
Come to New Jersey.
- [19:12]
A
I'll, I'll make a, make a little mecca to the Walmart in Jersey. I've been to one. I mean, in my life, I've been to one. It's just not part of the regular shopping pattern. All right, last question. If Walmart Connect was an animal, what animal would it be?
- [19:27]
B
You know, I think about it as, ooh, that's a good one. A bear. Because a bear can be cuddly, can be cute, but it can also get stuff done. So, like a cuddly bear.
- [19:38]
A
Bears are pretty efficient. All right, Kurum Malik from Walmart Connect, thank you so much for being here.
- [19:44]
B
Thank you, Eric. It was great.