Walmart announced yesterday its intention to acquire Vibe[dot]co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform.
Read: Walmart to Acquire Vibe[dot]co to Expand Access to Connected TV Advertising (June 23) – Walmart
The company said in the release:
“[Vibe’s technology will advance] Walmart’s strategy to build more accessible, full-funnel advertising solutions through Walmart Connect, its commerce media business. By combining Vibe[dot]co’s self-serve CTV platform with Walmart’s commerce audiences, closed-loop measurement and growing media ecosystem, including VIZIO, Walmart Connect aims to help more advertisers launch CTV campaigns and better measure their business impact.”
The deal will close by the end of Walmart’s current fiscal year — January 31, 2027. The Wall Street Journal reported that the purchase price is $1.4 billion.
Vibe CEO Arthur Querou said on LinkedIn:
“Joining forces with Walmart, the largest US retailer and second largest US ecommerce retailer as well as VIZIO’s ecosystem, will open up endless opportunities for the people we fight for every day: publishers and advertisers.
We unlocked Performance TV. Now it’s time to make it as big as Search & Social.
And we couldn’t have dreamed of a better home than Walmart to do so. (…)
To be clear though, this is not the finish line for us. It’s a massive accelerator for our mission to transform TV advertising forever.”
Read more on LinkedIn. (June 23)
Walmart’s feedback loop
With VIZIO, Vibe becomes the activation layer sitting on top of:
- TV operating system
- viewing signals
- commerce data
- retail media
- measurement
From tipsheet: Vibe brings more than 10,000 advertisers, while VIZIO provides Walmart with a connected TV ecosystem and source of viewing signals. Together they strengthen Walmart’s ability to connect TV advertising to commerce outcomes.
Walmart also brings more than 150,000 marketplace sellers and 500 million products, potentially expanding the pool of advertisers that can access connected TV through self-serve tools.
In a May interview with tipsheet, Vibe VP of Product Arnaud Blanchard described the company’s efforts to make streaming TV advertising easier to create, buy and optimize through AI-powered workflows. Walmart appears to be betting that TV advertising will increasingly operate more like digital performance marketing.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Introducing Claude Tag (June 23) – Anthropic
- We’re Partnering With EssilorLuxottica to Launch Meta Glasses (June 23) – Meta
- How GPT‑5 helped immunologist Derya Unutmaz solve a 3-year-old mystery (June 23) – OpenAI
COMMERCE MEDIA
Amazon brings agentic ads to Alexa+
Amazon announced Alexa+ Agentic Ads, a new advertising format designed for AI-assisted shopping and task completion. Brands can now appear inside Alexa+ conversations as users research products, compare options and take actions.
From the release:
“Alexa+ Agentic Ads allow customers to view an ad, ask questions, review options, and complete a purchase, all through a simple conversation with Alexa.
‘Customers are already turning to Alexa+ to discover and decide,’ said Charlotte Maines, VP, Content and Advertising for Alexa. ‘Alexa+ Agentic Ads close the gap between intent and action—a customer can go from curiosity to a completed purchase in a single conversation. This is a simple and useful experience for customers and a great opportunity for advertisers to drive engagement and immediate purchase.’”
Amazon recently merged its AI shopping assistant Rufus with Alexa. More here. (May 13)
Read:
- New Alexa+ Agentic Ads let shoppers purchase directly within an ad (June 23) – Amazon Ads
- Amazon’s latest ad format offers a glimpse of advertising’s agentic future (June 23) – Digiday
From tipsheet: Every retailer website is going to want a conversational commerce layer like this. Advertising has long been inserted into discovery systems such as search results, marketplaces and recommendation engines. What’s changing is that AI assistants are beginning to compress discovery, evaluation, recommendation and transaction into a single interaction. Amazon is positioning advertising inside that flow, creating a future where recommendation, decision and purchase occur within the same conversation.
COMMERCE MEDIA
Albertsons monetizes conversational discovery
Albertsons Media Collective announced a new integration with Criteo that brings sponsored product discovery into Albertsons’ AI-powered conversational search experience.
Brian Monahan, SVP of Retail Media at Albertsons Companies, said:
“As shoppers increasingly turn to conversational interfaces for meal inspiration, product discovery, and shopping guidance, we’re focused on ensuring brands can show up in ways that are relevant, helpful and measurable. (…)
Integrating sponsored products into conversational search is a natural evolution of retail media.”
According to the companies, brands will be able to surface sponsored products as shoppers use conversational AI to plan meals, discover products and build baskets.
In practice, this could look like:
- Was: “For taco night, you’ll need tortillas, chicken thighs, salsa and shredded cheese.”
- Now: “For taco night, consider Mission Tortillas, Perdue Chicken Thighs…”
Sponsored products will appear in recommendation carousels within the shopping conversation, according to Adweek.
Read:
- Albertsons Media Collective Brings Sponsored Product Discovery to AI-Powered Conversational Search (June 23) – Albertsons
- Brands Can Now Buy Albertsons Conversational Search Ads Through Criteo (June 23) – Adweek
From tipsheet: Search advertising was built around SERPs. Conversational commerce may not have SERPs, but Albertsons is betting that sponsored products can evolve from a placement in search results into a recommendation within a conversation.
PLATFORMS
AppLovin has opened self-serve access
AppLovin announced that AppLovin Ads is now open to all advertisers, removing the relationship and referral requirements that previously governed access to the platform.
CEO and co-founder Adam Foroughi writes:
“For 14 years, advertising with us required a relationship with our team. For the past eight months, it required a referral code. Starting today, it requires neither. Any business can sign up and reach our billion-plus daily active users.”
The company also announced that its self-serve advertising platform, previously known as Axon, will now be called AppLovin Ads. Axon will remain the name of the company’s AI recommendation system.
Read: AppLovin Ads is now open to all advertisers (June 23) – CEO Adam Foroughi on AppLovin’s blog
From tipsheet: AppLovin has spent years arguing that advertisers buy profit, not ads. Opening self-serve access is a natural extension of that thesis, allowing the company to aggregate more performance demand without the friction of relationship-based onboarding.
DATA
The canary in the CDP mine
Last week’s agentic customer data platform (CDP) launch, CustomerLake from Databricks, caught the attention of Forrester analyst Joe Stanhope.
He writes:
“CustomerLake isn’t about the customer data platform. It does not fundamentally change the trajectory of the CDP market. More importantly, CustomerLake represents an infrastructure-up build into marketing applications and one of the first ground up AI-native solutions for enterprise grade agentic marketing.”
Stanhope argues that CustomerLake is less a test of the CDP market than a test of marketers’ readiness to operationalize agentic marketing at scale.
Read more on LinkedIn. (June 23)
Read: “The Canary In The CDP Mine: Databricks CustomerLake Is The Litmus Test For Agentic Marketing” – Joe Stanhope on the Forrester blog
From tipsheet: Stanhope’s observation points to a broader shift in marketing technology. The question is becoming less whether a company has a CDP and more whether customer data, intelligence, decisioning and activation can operate inside the same AI-native system. If that happens, the CDP becomes a feature while the operating system becomes the product.
AGENTS
Concord bets on the execution layer
Media buying startup Concord raised $3 million in seed funding from A16Z Scout, Motier Ventures, Better Angle and a host of ad tech operators.
Concord says its AI agent can turn media briefs into live campaigns while managing pacing, optimization, reporting and budget allocation across buying platforms including DV360, Meta, Amazon DSP, TikTok and The Trade Desk.
The company is pursuing a longstanding industry ambition: a cross-platform operating layer that can execute campaigns across the advertising industry’s growing collection of black-box buying systems.
Nathan Venezia, CEO and co-founder of Concord, said, “We are building the infrastructure [media buying] runs on. Execution should be automated, learning from past campaigns so every team can focus on strategy instead of manual, low-value operations.”
Decisioning vs. execution
Here’s the distinction:
Decisioning:
- Which audiences should we target?
- How should budget be allocated?
- Which inventory should we buy?
- What is the optimal bid?
Execution:
- Launch the campaigns
- Configure platform settings
- Move budgets
- Update bids
- Generate reports
- Monitor pacing
- Implement changes across platforms
Read:
- Concord Raises $3M to Build Agentic Execution for Media Buying (June 23) – press release
- The Agentic Media Buying Platform That Says The Less AI, The Better (June 23) – AdExchanger
From tipsheet: Much of agentic advertising has focused on intelligence and decisioning. Concord is betting the bigger opportunity may be execution. If the first wave of programmatic built systems that decide what media to buy, the next wave may build systems that operate the platforms themselves.
MARKETING
Palantir enters marketing infrastructure
Palantir and Zeta Global announced a strategic partnership that will rebuild Zeta’s Data Cloud on Palantir Foundry.
According to the companies, Palantir’s data ontology, governance and operational data infrastructure will be combined with Athena by Zeta, its AI-powered marketing intelligence layer.
Zeta CEO David Steinberg tells Adweek the partnership could generate more than $100 million in annual revenue over time. He adds, “As we evolve from a marketing technology company to an AI infrastructure platform in partnership with Palantir, the goal is to move clients from a six to seven times return on marketing spend toward 10 times.”
Read:
- Palantir and Zeta Global Ink 7-Year Deal, Targeting $100M in Annual Revenue (June 23) – Adweek
- Palantir and Zeta Global Announce Strategic Partnership (June 23) – Zeta Global
From tipsheet: This looks less like an ad tech partnership and more like infrastructure convergence. Zeta is betting that customer intelligence belongs on the same infrastructure enterprises use to run operations, finance and supply chains.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Day 2: OpenAI, ChatGPT ads debut at Cannes
- Inside ChatGPT’s ads push (June 23) – Alex Heath on Sources (subscription)
- At Its First-Ever Cannes, OpenAI Says ‘We Are Clearly In The Advertising Business Now’ (June 23) – AdExchanger
- “Here are four things OpenAI’s David Dugan and Criteo CEO Michael Komasinski shared in a session on Criteo’s yacht” (June 23) – Analyst Debra Aho Williamson on LinkedIn
CONNECTED TV
Creator inventory comes to TV buying
Universal Ads announced that creator-led inventory from partners including creator-focused media companies will be available through its TV advertising platform. The move gives advertisers access to creator content through the same workflows used to buy streaming television inventory.
Read: Creators Make Some of the Best-Performing Ads on the Internet. Now They’re Coming to TV. (June 23) – Universal Ads
According to the release, the entire workflow is handled by creator marketing platform Insense, which helps with “sourcing creators, briefing them, production, editing, and delivering finished assets.”
From tipsheet: The interesting shift isn’t that creators are appearing on TV screens — that’s already happened. The shift is that TV buying infrastructure is beginning to treat creator content as another form of premium video inventory.
MORE
- Cannes Lions 2026: Strengthen creative campaigns with new Gemini-powered tools from YouTube (June 23) – Google Ads & Commerce blog
- Marketecture’s Ari Paparo, who is also an angel investor in Vibe, shared his take on the Walmart-Vibe deal in a thread (June 23) – Ari Paparo on X
- Samba TV acquires AI marketing startup Bestever AI (June 23) – Samba TV’s George Pappachen on LinkedIn
- Creative Is Advertising’s Biggest Untested Variable (June 23) – tvScientific’s Jason Fairchild on his Substack
- ‘AI slop needs to stop’: Samsung CMO says emotional intelligence will define marketing’s next era (June 23) – The Drum (subscription)