Where Sam's Club (With Help From Walmart) Thinks it Can Challenge Amazon
The new frontier in retail media is in-store
A few weeks ago at Cannes, Walmart subsidiary Sam’s Club announced a rebrand of its advertising business, and a deeper connection with Walmart Connect.
That news got somewhat overshadowed by Walmart’s eye-popping acquisition of Vibe. And while it’s true that even with Vibe, Walmart can’t (yet) compete with Amazon when it comes to TV ad inventory, the Walmart/Sam’s Club combo does have an intriguing avenue to leverage: thousands of huge stores.
I sat down with Harvey Ma, VP & GM, Sam’s Club Connect, atop the Walmart Connect rooftop in Cannes to talk about the company’s somewhat under appreciated asset - not only does it have stores, but because its customers are club members, they swipe membership cards when making purchases, trying food samples, even buying gas.
Which gives Sam’s Club enviable access to offline retail data.
“The retail media business has exploded over the past five years,” said Ma on this week’s Next in Media podcast. “There are so many retailer media networks out there, and we had the need to construct something that is uniquely value-driven for our membership base.”
“We’re connecting members to breakthrough experiences all across the shopping journey.”
In an interview last week, Paul Frampton-Calero, CEO, Goodway Group, talked about the potential new frontier in retail media, as the space becomes ever more crowded and potentially a sea of sameness.
“Walmart is trying to connect audience, media, transaction, and measurement in a way that makes it a much more direct competitor to Amazon Ads,” he said. “The difference is that Walmart brings a physical-store footprint and a real-world customer experience layer that Amazon does not have at the same scale.”
“Put simply: Amazon built the model for commerce media. Walmart is now building the physical-world version of it.”
As Ma explained things, every advertiser wants the same kind of closed-loop attribution they get from retail media in the real world.
“In-store measurement has always been that holy-grail enigma,” Ma said. “We joke that you can actually come into Sam’s Club and pay with a jar with pennies [and we’ll still collect data on that transaction],’ said Ma. “There is no need to extrapolate or create a doppelgänger.”
Check out the full interview here: