In some of their first comments since Walmart acquired smart-TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion, executives at both companies discussed the path to the deal, the integration process and a joint advertising offering now in beta testing.
“It’s important that we learn from one another,” said Seth Dallaire, EVP and Chief Growth Officer at Walmart, during Vizio’s NewFronts presentation to advertisers Tuesday in New York. “We have not historically had a lot of connected-TV in our portfolio. So, the way that Vizio brings that product to market, the way it speaks to marketers in the meetings with brands and with agencies is really important for us to learn more about. Similarly, we have a very specific way that we talk about retail media offerings and the objectives we can meet through advertising to all the customers who are shopping in our stores.”
The merger, which alters the landscape of streaming ads, closed last December.
Dallaire came to Walmart after having held exec posts at major tech companies like Amazon, Instacart and Microsoft. He has led the charge for Walmart Connect, the company’s retail media network. The networks are a hot commodity in media, given the fragmentation in linear TV and other areas of the commercial world.
While Dallaire and Vizio founder and CEO William Wang offered no specifics about the joint ad plan, they described its collaborative DNA.
“Being able to work together and bring something forward that answers objectives or meets that criteria that hasn’t been able to be met before is important,” Dallaire continued. “It doesn’t mean that this is the only way we’ll be working together. We’re going through this process of learning.”
Wang noted that Walmart had already been the smart-TV firm’s largest customer. “We’ve been together a long time,” he said. “We’re very humbled. I started this business in my garage and now we’re part of the big Walmart family.”
Several years ago, Wang oversaw an expansion of Vizio’s advertising efforts and the creation of brand-friendly environments like SmartCast and WatchFree, which have generated billions in revenue. That has created a valuable business line apart from the company’s No. 2 line of TV sets. The hardware business is more volatile and expensive, with constant downward pressure of pricing.
Wang said his professional path was shaped by an early role in customer service soon after he graduated college more than four decades ago. “I learned then that the customer had to be the center of everything,” he said, a value in common with Walmart’s origin story.
“There’s a lot of adjacency with the advertising business, the platform business” and the massive retail core of Walmart, Dallaire observed. Connected-TV, which is increasingly in demand with advertisers, is “complementary but different” from the rest of Walmart Connect, which has traditionally been centered on the No. 1 U.S. retailer’s app. Vizio “sits in a different part of the marketing funnel,” so it “makes sense to bring the two together.”
The discussion was moderated by Michael O’Donnell, Chief Revenue and Strategic Growth Officer at Vizio.
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