Live From Cannes with Walmart Connect's Ryan Mayward

Summary

Next in Media: Live From Cannes with Walmart Connect's Ryan Mayward

Release Date: June 20, 2025

In this insightful episode of Next in Media, host Mike Shields engages with Ryan Mayward, Senior Vice President of Retail Media Sales at Walmart Connect. The conversation delves into the transformative landscape of retail media, exploring how Walmart Connect is leveraging technology and data to navigate and lead in an ever-evolving media, marketing, and advertising ecosystem.

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1. The Evolution of Retail Media and Off-Platform Strategies

Ryan Mayward begins by tracing Walmart Connect's roots in advertising within the Walmart shopping app and walmart.com, utilizing channels like search, display, and video. He emphasizes the company's strategic shift towards reaching customers beyond the traditional shopping environment.

“Our history is definitely rooted in advertising in the Walmart shopping app and walmart.com through search, display, video. But... we've been on a journey to reach Walmart customers outside of the shopping environment.”
— Ryan Mayward [00:45]

He highlights the launch of the Walmart DSP in partnership with The Trade Desk as a pivotal move to engage Walmart audiences wherever they consume content. This expansion includes partnerships with major players in the Connected TV (CTV) space such as NBC Universal, Disney, and Paramount Plus, as well as integrations with leading social platforms like Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest.

“The last couple of years has been the fastest growing part of our business.”
— Ryan Mayward [02:11]

2. Coordinating Multi-Channel Retail Media

Shields and Mayward discuss the complexities of managing diverse advertising channels—from CTV to social media—and the necessity of a nuanced, full-funnel approach. Ryan underscores the importance of understanding how each touchpoint contributes to the overall sales journey.

“What does each touchpoint contribute to ultimate sales? That’s where we’re really learning.”
— Ryan Mayward [02:11]

He explains the introduction of new metrics, such as consideration, which tracks indicators like ad-attributed visits to product detail pages. These metrics help demonstrate the value of off-site touchpoints in driving future sales.

3. Integration with Vizio and Expansion into CTV

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on Walmart Connect’s recent acquisition of Vizio and its implications. Ryan shares updates on the integration process, including two key beta projects:

1. Walmart Audiences on Vizio TVs: Leveraging existing partnerships with Disney, NBCU, and Paramount to measure sales outcomes through CTV.
2. Home Screen Advertising: Introducing advertising opportunities on the Vizio home screen, enhancing reach and engagement.

“We’re really excited to have Vizio as part of the Walmart family... we have two betas that are getting off the ground.”
— Ryan Mayward [03:50]

Additionally, Walmart Connect is experimenting with deploying the Vizio OS on other devices, broadening their advertising reach and strengthening their data-driven strategies.

4. Strategic Partnerships and Recent Announcements

Ryan highlights recent partnerships, notably with Omnicom’s influencer agency Creo. This collaboration aims to address challenges in influencer marketing, such as selecting the right influencers and improving attribution.

“Retail media and influencer marketing are highly complementary... helping brands reach the right customer to drive sales.”
— Ryan Mayward [05:45]

Another major announcement involves expanding Walmart Connect’s measurement capabilities with NBC Universal to include linear live sports broadcasts. This extension allows for the measurement of brand outcomes during live sports events across both Peacock and traditional linear channels.

“This is a first of its kind partnership for us. We’re really excited about it.”
— Ryan Mayward [06:13]

5. Shoppable Television: Current Status and Future Prospects

The discussion shifts to the burgeoning field of shoppable television. Although still in its early stages, Walmart Connect is exploring various methods to integrate shopping seamlessly into the TV viewing experience.

“We’re still trying to figure out the best ways to do that... text to shop and QR codes are a couple of easy starting points.”
— Ryan Mayward [07:44]

He anticipates that second screen interactions will play a pivotal role in enhancing the shoppable TV experience, allowing viewers to engage with ads without disrupting their viewing.

6. Long-Term Vision: Expanding Beyond Retail Media

When asked about the long-term vision for Walmart Connect, Ryan envisions a platform that offers full-funnel solutions to advertisers of all sizes. This includes working with both endemic and non-endemic brands across various industries such as financial services, travel, automotive, and quick-service restaurants.

“Our long-term vision is to work with all advertisers of all sizes and provide full funnel solutions.”
— Ryan Mayward [08:46]

He emphasizes the importance of AI-enabled creative tools to lower barriers for small and mid-sized brands, facilitating their entry into TV advertising through automated and data-driven solutions.

7. Embracing Agentic AI in Shopping and Advertising

The conversation then explores the potential impact of agentic AI on shopping experiences and advertising strategies. Ryan describes Walmart's integration of AI through Sparky, an AI assistant within the Walmart app that enhances product discovery without intrusive advertising.

“Sparky... can start asking questions, start searching for products. It’s all product recommendations right now.”
— Ryan Mayward [10:56]

He envisions a future where AI not only improves customer experience but also seamlessly integrates advertising once the user benefits from personalized recommendations.

8. The Importance of Partnerships and Future Roadmaps

Concluding the discussion, Ryan underscores the value of partnerships with brands, agencies, and media companies. Attending industry events like Cannes serves as a crucial platform for Walmart Connect to share roadmaps, announce new initiatives, and gather insights to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving media landscape.

“Our space is just changing so much right now. It’s almost hard to keep up... this is a great place to catch up with brands and figure out where they’re headed.”
— Ryan Mayward [11:51]

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Key Takeaways

• Walmart Connect is expanding its retail media strategies beyond the Walmart ecosystem into broader channels like CTV and social media.
• Integration with Vizio enhances Walmart Connect’s capability to reach audiences on TV and other devices, opening new avenues for measurement and advertising.
• Strategic partnerships, such as with Omnicom’s Creo and NBC Universal, are pivotal in addressing challenges in influencer marketing and expanding measurement capabilities.
• Shoppable television remains in its nascent stages, with ongoing experiments to create seamless and non-intrusive shopping experiences on TV.
• The long-term vision involves providing comprehensive advertising solutions to a diverse range of brands, supported by AI-driven tools to democratize access to TV advertising.
• Agentic AI through tools like Sparky aims to enrich the shopping experience, with potential future integration of advertising once consumer satisfaction is ensured.
• Partnerships and continuous innovation are essential for Walmart Connect to maintain its leadership in the dynamic media and advertising landscape.

This episode provides a comprehensive overview of Walmart Connect’s strategies and future directions, offering valuable insights for industry professionals and enthusiasts alike.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to Next in Media. I'm Mike Shields. I'm here with my guest today is Ryan Mayward. He is the SVP of retail media sales for Walmart Connect. Do I have that right, Ryan?

[A]

You do, yeah.

[B]

Thanks for being here. We're working today, suffering in this, in this tough location.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I'm excited to talk to you. There's a lot going on with you guys in this space. I guess the bigger story as retail media has kind of blown up the last few years. The, you know, the, the initial focus was on that immediate amazing attribution of, of reaching somebody right when they're in a shopping mode. Now you were, everyone's trying to talk about this off platform strategy. How did, how are you guys kind of approaching that?

[A]

Well, our, our history is definitely rooted in advertising in the Walmart shopping app and walmart.com through search, display, video. But you're right in that over the last several years we've been on a journey to reach Walmart customers outside of the shopping environment. And we really started with Walmart dsp. We launched that several years ago in partnership with the trade desk. This was the first opportunity that we had to reach Walmart audiences wherever they were consuming content and then measure sales outcomes after we expose the ads to them. That was a great jumping on point for us in the dsp. We've since expanded into CTV inventory through partnerships with NBC Universal and Disney and Paramount plus and others. And we've also integrated with a number of the top social platforms, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and we've seen great results there as well. Again like reaching Walmart customers while they're consuming content on social platforms, watching videos and live experiences and measuring sales outcomes as a result. So the last call it two years has been the fastest growing part of our business.

[B]

You're reaching people in all these different places from CTV to social to your, they're all going to perform differently. You know there's a level of coordination when you're, you're trying to talk to brands and do you kind of have to like level step expectations? Like not all retail media is going to perform like a search ad product. It's about a full or funnel approach.

[A]

The question is how does each touch point contribute to ultimate sales? And that's where we're really learning. I think things like driving considerations becomes important. Offsite media helps us understand the middle of the customer journey. We're all familiar with awareness and how to measure awareness and why that's important. We're familiar with driving sales Outcomes and say a search environment and how to do that and how to measure that. But what happens in between those two points is something that we can shine a brighter light on by defining what a consideration is like a ad attributed visit to a product detail page. These are things that are indicators of future sales and things that are driven very effectively and efficiently by things like CTV and social. So that's one way to think about it is using new metrics to show the value of these additional sort of off site touch points.

[B]

So you're probably talking to a much bigger, you know, where you start out with the retail media budgets and the specialty, now you got everybody involved. Get the more complicated you think.

[A]

Absolutely. When you're going to market with ctv, I mean you're working with the big agencies and their media investment teams as well as the brand and the original shopper marketing who got these stars to.

[B]

Different metrics and numbers methods.

[A]

Yeah, that is a, that is a challenge. Is reconciling the right way to measure every one of these touch points that satisfies what the brand wants, the agency wants, the shopper marketing team in Bentonville wants as well.

[B]

All right, catch us up. You know, it's still relatively early.

[A]

The Vizio acquisition closed December.

[B]

How's the integration going? Where, how are you working with them? Which we kind of.

[A]

Yeah, it's going great. We're really excited to have Vizio as part of the Walmart family. It's a great team and I think we're moving with with good pace here. We have two betas that are getting off the ground. The first is addressing Walmart audiences on Vizio TVs and then adding that closed loop attribution. Given our history with Disney and NBCU and Paramount and the others, we know how CTV performs, we know what it accomplishes. We did a study with WPP recently, for example, that shows that CTV is very effective at driving a lift in branded searches. So we know where CTV fits into brand strategy. Um, this is really about nailing the technical integration and then preparing to scale and get the entire sales team behind Visio. The other beta is the home screen, a very, very effective surface for advertising. And there again we're going to bring Walmart audiences to the Vizio home screen. And that beta is just getting off the ground in the last week or two. And so things are going really well. We're also experimenting and outside of an advertising environment by taking the Vizio OS and putting it on other devices, which is an exciting development. Yeah, I mean, the more people we have to reach the more powerful the advertising opportunity is. And that's one of the ways we're doing it. Yeah.

[B]

And the OS is, you know, more and more, more and more to. To building an ad business.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Do you guys have some news this week? Let's talk about.

[A]

Yeah, we have a couple big announcements. One with Omnicom that just happened. We were partnering with their influencer agency called Creo. And I think a couple of the friction points in the burgeoning, you know, influencer advertising space are picking the right influencers for a brand and then better understanding attribution. And we're going to help on both fronts. We're really.

[B]

You don't expect those worlds maybe to come together. That's, that's pretty interesting.

[A]

Yeah. I don't think you do expect retail media and influencer marketing to necessarily the natural fit, but they're highly complementary and you know, you can view an influencer as a proxy for a brand's target audience. So the question is, how do you find influencers that reach the audience that a brand wants to reach? And that's where we're bringing our audiences to TikTok and partnering with Omnicom to find the right influencer for the right brand to reach the right customer that's going to drive sales for their products.

[B]

Yeah, I guess the key there is, right, finding the right enforcer is your shop reads it. Also you want to make sure that you capture that authenticity without, you know, the brewing.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And given that we have our customers buying groceries from Us Weekly and then on those trips or in between those trips buying apparel and electronics, like we have a very well rounded perspective on our customers that comes in very handy when selecting influencers for a brand. So we're starting with TikTok and moving on from there in the next few months. So that's exciting. Another big announcement this week is NBC Universal. So we've been partners with NVCU for a couple of years now and the expansion now is extending our measurement to linear for their live sports. So we've already been identifying Walmart audiences in NBC Sports and targeting them across Peacock and elsewhere. Now we can have live sports, including the linear broadcast at Measure Outcomes, your brand. So it's a first of its kind partnership for us. We're really excited about it.

[B]

I imagine that's while David, I could see shoppable television. Yeah, I guess how much is shoppable to push to that?

[A]

It doesn't have to be a part of it, but with things like text to shop and QR Codes. We can certainly bring a shoppable element to both CTV and the Linear broadcast.

[B]

What's the latest on shoppable television? That's, that's an area that's a lot of excitement, investment, experimenting.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Still feels pretty early.

[A]

What's going on with it is early. That's what I would say is up next. With respect to Vizio, we've been getting the PMP off the ground and now we're focused on home screen. But we're in early stages talking about how do we do shoppable. Right. I think you really want to nail the customer experience. You don't want to be interruptive, you want to make it a seamless way to interact with the brand. And we're still trying to figure out the best ways to do that. We, as I said, text to shop and QR codes are a couple of easy starting points.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you know, do you, do you.

[B]

Feel like, you know, it's going to be a remote, it's going to be text, it's going to be voice in terms of the common behavior or is it still up?

[A]

I think it's still up in the air. Second screen is going to be a powerful component to shoppable tv. But yeah, I think that there's a lot of experimenting left to do before we nail the customer experience. And what works best for brands.

[B]

What is that? What's the long term vision? You've got this powerful data, you're in more, more channels, you're becoming a bigger player. Going beyond retail media. What's the long term meaning for Walmart Connect?

[A]

Yeah, I think working with all advertisers of all sizes and providing full funnel solutions to them. That's the long term vision. And I think that for brands that sell their products at Walmart, we've been building out the full funnel value prop for the last several years. That's why all of our partnerships with other media companies are so important. Social ctv, our DSP offering. These are the things that help us drive awareness, consideration and of course purchase in the Walmart shopping app and then outside of brands that work with us as on the retail side of our business, that sell their products in our stores. We're starting to work with a lot of non endemic brands as well. And financial services and travel and quick serve restaurants and automotive and other categories. That's right. It's not net new to retail media. We've been doing this at retail media for a while. It's a newer area for Walmart and so working with non endemic brands is A big priority and then brands large and small. I'd say that Walmart Connect got started with the largest brands in the world and we've since built out a very large business working with small to medium sized brands and third party sellers that are participating in our marketplace. So large brands, small brands and sellers, endemic and non endemic advertisers, those are kind of the quadrants.

[B]

Okay. So on that note, the small and.

[A]

Midsize brands, the big barrier to entry, are one of them in the TV realm. And we also have an opportunity to solve that on their behalf. Interesting. Through, you know, AI enabled creative tools. Um, we're building out our creative stack now and we're starting with display but we'll soon move to video and you'll see smaller brands having an easier path to advertising on tv.

[B]

Right. And they know you, it's probably, it's an easier sell than you know, like trying to, trying to come out from nowhere. Hey, I can get you on television. You've got the data, you're the inventory.

[A]

Could tie it into what they're already doing with us and measure it with familiar memories.

[B]

All right, let me ask you a big picture long term question. This is no. 1. You know, there's so much to talk about agentic AI, how it's going to change everything in our lives. No one knows exact exactly where this is headed. Have you guys already thought about how that might. Well obviously how it's going to could change shopping, but also this whole category.

[A]

Yeah, we're starting with shopping piece, obviously figuring out how to bring agentic AI in the shopping experience. If you open up your Walmart shopping app, you'll see Sparky down in the bottom of the app. You can hit Sparky and start asking questions, start searching for products and I think it's a pretty amazing experience. There's no advertising in there. It's all product recommendations right now. And that's really first and foremost what we're after is nailing the customer experience, making it an amazing opportunity for them to find exactly what they're looking for as well as drive discovery. And I think that after we get to a point where we're really comfortable that the customer is getting what they want out of it, we can move into more of an advertising framework and figure out what the right ad experience is. But it is absolutely early days as you suggested.

[B]

Yeah, we don't know how consumers are going to respond. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens. Last thing we're, we're here, we're in. Can kind of What? What are you here looking to achieve? What? What's on your mind? What are you hearing about? It's interesting.

[A]

Partner meetings. I mean this is just an amazing opportunity to connect with the brands, the agencies and all the media companies that we work with. They're all here, all their top people are here and we're really excited to be spending time with them sharing what the back half of our year looks like roadmap wise. That's why we're here making all these announcements and checking in on their business, seeing what they need, learning from them. Our space is just changing so much right now. It's just almost hard to keep up. But that's part of the fun of it and this is a great place to catch up with brands and figure out where they're headed.

[B]

All right, Ryan, I'll let you get back to it but thanks so much. Awesome conversation. Let's do this again.