Walmart is bringing its shopper audiences to Vibe, the self-serve CTV advertising platform it acquired this summer. Announced last week, the integration gives advertisers access to audiences built from Walmart’s online and in-store commerce signals.
Read: “Walmart’s first-party audiences are now available in Vibe” (Oct. 29) – Walmart Connect
Three perspectives help explain the opportunity:
- The strategy: Walmart Connect GM and SVP Ryan Mayward highlights Vibe’s appeal to performance marketers: “Vibe has built a self-serve platform and real demand from performance marketers looking for a more accessible way to put CTV to work in their media mix.” Read more. (Oct. 29)
- The AI mechanics: In an interview with TVREV’s Alan Wolk, Vibe CEO Arthur Querou describes how AI helps advertisers choose among thousands of Walmart audiences. He also outlines a workflow using Claude to develop strategies for individual products, generate creative through Higgsfield and set up campaigns through Vibe’s MCP, CLI and API. Read it. (Oct. 29)
- The competitive stakes: Adweek’s Kendra Barnett reports that a Vibe spokesperson named Amazon, Roku and The Trade Desk as competitors the integration could help Walmart challenge. The Trade Desk is also a longtime Walmart DSP partner. Walmart declined to address the comment on the record. Read that one. (Oct. 29)
Related: Introducing new pathways to programmatic CTV at scale (Apr. 27) – Walmart Connect
AI agents
Beyond advertising, Walmart’s new gateway lets AI agents shop on behalf of customers (Oct. 21) — a development Aperiam’s Eric Franchi highlighted on the latest Marketecture podcast: “All of these companies are either blocking or embracing agentic commerce … Walmart is going in. So, basically, you’re going to be able to authorize your agent to have a connection with your Walmart account. You can start shopping. You can have permissions. This looks really good.” Hear it. (Oct. 30)
From tipsheet: From self-serve CTV to agentic shopping, Walmart is moving fast.
TECH
Affle buys Perion and its AI ambitions
Ad tech firm Perion announced Sunday that it has agreed to be acquired by Indian mobile ad tech firm Affle for approximately $420 million in cash. The $11.70-per-share offer represents a 34.5% premium to Friday’s closing price. Perion would become an Affle subsidiary.
In a company press release, CEO Tal Jacobson emphasized the company’s newer direction:
“Through Perion One and our Outmax AI agent, we continue to advance how advertising performance is executed and optimized across channels to ensure the best ROI on media investments for our customers.”
Read: “Perion Enters into Definitive Merger Agreement with Affle” (Nov. 1) – Perion
LUMA Partners’ Terence Kawaja said on LinkedIn that his investment banking firm served as an advisor to Affle in the transaction and he expects M&A “momentum to accelerate.”
More: “Perion to be acquired by India’s Affle for $420 million, marking a steep fall for a once-billion-dollar Israeli company” (Nov. 1) – CTech by Calcalist
From tipsheet: Consolidation nation.
Perion held $228.3 million in cash, deposits and marketable securities at the end of September — more than half the purchase price.
PLATFORMS
Amazon VP: New name. Still a DSP.
A day after Amazon reported earnings, Neal Richter, its vice president of advertising science and engineering for Amazon DSP, offered a technical argument with a broader message about the company’s advertising ambitions.
Richter addressed the rebranding of Amazon DSP as DVA+, describing a streamlined buying experience powered by Performance+, Brand+ and Ads Agent. His hashtags supplied the shorthand: #stillaDSP #justmore.
Writing on LinkedIn, Richter backed IAB Tech Lab’s new Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) Implementation Guide, which aims to improve coordination between buyers and sellers during live streaming events:
“Live events in programmatic broke an assumption ad tech has quietly relied on for years: that inventory has steady predictable arrival rate. It doesn’t. When millions of people arrive at a stream in the same sixty seconds, forecasting, pacing, and delivery that were tuned for steady state have great difficulty.”
His prescription also served as a statement about Amazon’s approach: “Standards are how an industry compounds progress instead of each company re-solving the same problem in isolation.” Read more on LinkedIn. (Oct. 30)
From tipsheet: Nearly a year ago, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green argued that Amazon’s DSP was mostly about buying Prime Video and predicted it would evolve into tools for buying Amazon’s own media. Richter’s #stillaDSP #justmore offers a different vision: a broader buying platform with an easier interface, powered by AI. His emphasis on shared industry standards reinforces Amazon’s claim to a role beyond its own inventory.
Related: “Amazon’s Ads nears $20 billion in Q3 as it bets on agentic AI to fuel further growth” (Oct. 30) – Digiday
COMMERCE MEDIA
DoorDash-Instacart: A third force in retail media?
Acadia CEO and co-founder Jared Belsky sees delivery platform DoorDash’s agreement to acquire Instacart for approximately $17 billion as a welcome development for advertisers: a stronger alternative to Amazon and Walmart.
Beyond the additional advertising inventory, Belsky highlights the technology DoorDash would acquire. He writes on LinkedIn:
“DoorDash already had scale and frequency. With Instacart, it bought SOPHISTICATION.
So DoorDash didn’t just buy another place to buy ads. It bought the infrastructure under a big chunk of regional grocery retail media and far more.”
Read more. (Oct. 30)
The companies’ announcement makes a similar case: combining delivery, commerce, advertising and AI tools could help local retailers compete with capabilities the largest retailers build for themselves.
From tipsheet: There’s an open web parallel here. Independent retailers and publishers face a similar challenge: matching the technology of giant platforms while preserving their own customer relationships. AI could make shared infrastructure more valuable by giving smaller businesses capabilities they couldn’t afford to build alone. The question is how much independence they retain when another company supplies the technology and mediates access to the customer.
COMMERCE MEDIA
Is CPG ready for agentic commerce?
No.
Some 59% of US consumer packaged goods companies report no meaningful agentic AI capabilities, according to new BCG research.
The global consulting firm recommends brands build their own agents to collect first-party data and connect with retailers and AI platforms. But it also identifies an obstacle: 87% of retailers don’t share customer data with agents at all.
Getting recommended by an AI agent, in other words, doesn’t guarantee access to the customer insights that follow.
For brands, that raises a familiar problem in a new setting: how much can they learn about their customers when someone else controls the shopping relationship?
Read: “Are CPG Companies Ready for Agentic Commerce?” (Oct. 30) – BCG
SELL-SIDE
A shared AI training opt-out
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are backing a proposed shared AI training opt-out for website owners, reports Search Engine Land.
The proposal builds on work at the Internet Engineering Task Force and would preserve publishers’ ability to make exceptions for individual AI providers.
Google Search Advocate John Mueller explains:
“Instead of managing separate instructions for every AI developer, website owners will be able to use a shared ‘policy token’ within robots.txt to set broad preferences across participating AI providers.”
Google plans to support the control in 2027.
In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft CVP of Monetization, Commerce & the AI Economy Tim Frank frames the proposal as overdue: “This should have existed from the start. Explicit IP preferences, honored across the major labs and search providers, is the foundation a fair AI economy needs.” Read it. (Oct. 30)
Read: “Supporting a shared AI training control for websites” (Oct. 30) – Google Search Central blog
The announcement follows Google’s introduction of a separate Search Console control that lets publishers exclude their content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover while remaining in traditional Search. We covered that development in July. Google now says the control became available worldwide on August 31. That setting does not control AI training.
From tipsheet: Publisher permissions are becoming more specific: appearing in traditional Search, participating in AI-generated answers and allowing model training are increasingly separate decisions. The commercial question remains: which uses deliver enough traffic, visibility or compensation to justify granting access?
SEARCH
Debates: Product feeds are the ad
Yext Chairman and CEO Michael Walrath, an ad tech OG who led Right Media Exchange, argues on X that AI will reshape search marketing around product information and the value advertisers place on an outcome:
“The entire structure of search marketing will change in an AI world. That market structure will not be about ads/copy/link/CPC. It will be about providing structured, detailed product (broad definition) to the AI Search/assistants, alongside a “value” for a lead, sale etc.
The winners (and there will be multiple) will compound memory/context advantage (I know more about the user), access to structured data and “value bids” on actions (the new marketplace) and perhaps most importantly USER TRUST to deliver sponsored offers in conversation.
This will be the biggest advertising and commerce market we’ve ever seen, and it is truly up for grabs right now.”
Read more about the winners. (Oct. 30)
FINANCIALS
Earnings this week
A selection of companies across AI and advertising reporting this week:
- Today – Apple
- Today – Fox, Roku
- Wednesday, November 4 – AppLovin
- Wednesday, November 4 – Magnite
- Wednesday, November 4 – Taboola
- Thursday, November 5 – Unity
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Fair-use defense: “Fair use benefits everyone” (Oct. 30) – OpenAI
- Recursive self-improvement (RSI): “The Smartest People in AI Believe This Is the World’s Most Important Chart” (Oct. 30) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
- Applying AI: “Museums Turn to A.I. to Create Personalized Tour Experiences” (Nov. 1) – The New York Times (subscription)
MORE
- CTV feedback loop: “Tatari Launches Tatari Max…” (Oct. 29) – Tatari
- Agency transformation: “Amid growing tension over workplace AI, agencies have a window to reimagine staffing” (Oct. 30) – Digiday (subscription)
- Advertiser control op-ed: “The dog, not the tail: Who really controls the media dollar?” (Oct. 29) – S4 Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell in The Current, owned by The Trade Desk
- Demand Comparison: “Compare revenue, eCPM, and impressions between CloudX and your demand partners down to the ad unit, in the dashboard or via the API.” (Oct. 29) – CloudX blog