Walmart buys self-serve CTV platform Vibe.co in deal WSJ pegs at $1.4 billion
Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform built for small and mid-sized businesses, is being acquired by Walmart Connect in a deal announced Tuesday. Walmart left the purchase price undisclosed. The Wall Street Journal reports the total comes to roughly $1.4 billion, made up of a $1.2 billion cash payout to Vibe.co and about $180 million earmarked for the company's top executives, who must stay at Walmart for four years as part of the agreement. Vibe.co CEO Arthur Querou and CTO Franck Tetzlaff will join Walmart's advertising unit, and the platform's advertisers can already launch CTV campaigns for $50 a day with real-time attribution, conversion pixels and tracking integrations for Shopify, Google Analytics and other mobile measurement partners.
Small and mid-sized advertisers priced out of national TV buys gain a self-service path onto connected TV inventory, with campaigns startable at $50 a day and measurement wired directly into Shopify and Google Analytics. Agencies planning commerce media budgets now weigh a Walmart Connect stack that pairs Vibe.co's ad-buying tools with Walmart's shopper data and Vizio's screens, arriving days after Amazon struck a deal to bring remote-enabled shoppable ads to Samsung TV Plus. The two retail giants are racing to turn CTV into a performance channel with attribution built in, which raises the bar for any TV plan that can't show a direct line from impression to purchase.