Vizio’s plans for advertisers under its new owner, Walmart, are nascent but coming into a bit more focus.
At its 2025 NewFronts presentation on Monday, the smart TV manufacturer talked about a few new formats and products that let advertisers use Walmart’s reams of shopping data. Vizio claims to reach 79 million people.
Walmart is in the process of testing its first Vizio-run streaming ads. As part of those tests, advertisers can buy Vizio inventory through Walmart’s demand-side platform. ADWEEK first reported the capability. Additionally, ADWEEK reported that Walmart is seeking $200,000 commitments from advertisers to run Vizio ads.
Walmart’s involvement with Vizio’s NewFronts presentation was quick and to the point. During a Q&A format with Vizio CEO William Wang, Walmart chief growth officer Seth Dallaire spoke about how the Vizio team fits under his “growth” team at Walmart—a group that includes advertising arm Walmart Connect, subscription product Walmart+, Walmart’s data initiatives, consumer-facing marketing, and product and design.
“There’s a lot of adjacency with advertising at Walmart,” Dallaire said about the Vizio acquisition. “Connected TV is one of the fastest-growing inventory areas—it represents an area that is complementary but different to what the retail media business has been at Walmart.”
Walmart primarily sells performance-driven ads for its suppliers, and Vizio primarily sells streaming TV ads to marketers aimed at building brand awareness. That combination of skills is new for the retail giant, according to Dallaire.
“The way that Vizio brings stuff out of the market, the way that we speak to marketers, the objectives that we’re meeting for the brands and agencies is really important for us to learn about at Walmart,” he said. “Similarly, we have a very specific way that we talk about retail media offerings and the objectives that we can meet through advertising to Walmart customers.”
Driving sales for CPG advertisers
Among the early adopters, Unilever has tested Vizio ads run by Walmart’s technology. Aaron Sobol, head of North American media investment and data governance at Unilever, said that the goal of the tests is to experiment with new inventory and ways of sharing data to measure the impact of campaigns.
“As the ecosystem increases, we have more supply to play with, and the data can travel in different ways,” Sobol said.