Walmart and Amazon Step Up the Race for Digital Ad Spending

As Walmart and Amazon look to boost their margins through digital media sales, the two retail giants are sweetening the deal for potential advertisers.

The former announced last month that its warehouse club chain subsidiary Sam’s Club’s Member Access Platform (MAP) is launching display ads within its Scan & Go feature, making it the self-proclaimed first retail media platform to introduce advertisements through a mobile self-checkout app. The goal is to offer advertisers a way to reach consumers at the highest-intent moments.

“This new capability reflects our member obsession and commitment to ensuring ads reach the right members at the right time in their shopping journeys,” Diana Marshall, the warehouse club chain’s executive vice president and chief growth officer, said in a statement. “Creating a closed loop, omnichannel advertising experience enables us to better understand member shopping behavior and ad performance, ensuring we keep the member experience at the forefront while helping our advertisers achieve their objectives.”

Additionally, Walmart’s retail media business, Walmart Connect, is looking to expand its roster of in-store advertisers, Adweek reported. The retailer is reportedly trying to get companies that do not sell through Walmart, such as financial firms and restaurants, to purchase ads on the retailer’s in-store screens, such as those on self-checkout kiosks or televisions.

“National non-endemic brands, known for their large-scale brand-building campaigns, are now recognizing the untapped potential of in-store platforms to increase brand exposure,” a Walmart Connect spokesperson said in a statement, per the report.

Amazon, meanwhile, is looking to capture advertisers’ spending by touting lower prices for placements through its Prime Video streaming service than those offered by competitor Netflix, the Financial Times reported.

Additionally, Amazon Ads announced Wednesday (July 31) that its Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is now accessible on AWS Clean Rooms, offering advertisers the ability to optimize advertising and business performance within their existing AWS accounts.

A clean room is a secure environment where advertisers can combine their data with external data without exposing or moving their underlying information. It allows companies to collaborate with other data sources such as Amazon Ads to gain insights and create targeted marketing strategies while ensuring their data remains private and protected. Integrating AMC enables them to access and analyze this data directly within their existing AWS accounts, making the process simpler and more efficient and giving advertisers greater control.

“Clean rooms play an important role in helping advertisers navigate the evolving addressability landscape by helping them produce unique insights and create custom audiences through the collaboration of their first-party data and accurate third-party signals,” Paula Despins, Amazon Ads’ vice president of ads measurement, analytic, and data science, said in a statement. “Amazon Marketing Cloud has proved to offer advertisers significant value, and we’re excited to now have it on AWS Clean Rooms.”

As both Walmart and Amazon expand their digital advertising platforms, the competition between the retail giants is set to reshape the retail media landscape. Walmart’s innovations in mobile and in-store advertising and Amazon’s competitive pricing and data integration efforts underscore a broader shift toward more targeted and efficient digital ad solutions, highlighting the growing importance of data-driven strategies in the quest for brands’ spending.

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