Walmart is spending big to build a business that has nothing to do with selling groceries. The retailer said on June 23 it will acquire Vibe.co, a French advertising-technology firm, for about $1.4 billion — its largest acquisition since it bought the smart-TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion in 2024.
The deal
The price breaks into roughly $1.2 billion in cash to Vibe.co, plus about $180 million paid to the company's top executives after the deal closes, contingent in part on their staying with Walmart for four years, TV Tech reported. Walmart framed it as advancing "more accessible, full-funnel advertising solutions" through Walmart Connect, its retail-media arm.
What Vibe.co does
Vibe.co is a connected-TV (CTV) advertising platform — software that lets brands buy and target ads on internet-connected televisions and streaming services. Its self-serve tools are aimed at small and mid-sized advertisers that lack the budgets or agency relationships to buy streaming-TV ads the traditional way, an underserved slice of the market. The platform offers access to inventory across hundreds of streaming channels, audience targeting and measurement that ties an ad back to a sale.
A quick glossary: retail media is the business of a retailer selling advertising using the shopper data it already holds; ad-tech is the software that automates buying, targeting and measuring those ads. The Vibe.co deal layers ad-selling software on top of the viewing data Walmart gained from Vizio.
Why Walmart wants it
The logic is margins. Walmart Connect generated roughly $6.4 billion in revenue in its most recent reported period, according to Fortune — a sliver of Walmart's total sales, but far more profitable than the thin margins on selling food and household goods. Because Walmart processes hundreds of millions of transactions, it can tell advertisers not just who might be interested but who actually buys — and brands pay a premium for that precision.
Connecting that purchase data to streaming-TV ads is the next step, as viewers shift from cable to ad-supported streaming and the audience for traditional TV ads fragments. With Vizio's installed base of TVs and now Vibe.co's ad software, Walmart is assembling an end-to-end CTV advertising operation.
The Amazon shadow
The target is clear. Walmart's ad revenue is roughly a tenth the size of Amazon's advertising business, Fortune noted — a unit built on the same retail-media logic that has become one of Amazon's most profitable segments. Amazon has paired that with its own streaming inventory on Fire TV and Prime Video.
Walmart is trying to construct a comparable stack, and the gap is still wide. But the strategic direction reflects a broader bet among big retailers: that high-margin advertising, fed by proprietary shopper data, is the best hedge against the low-margin reality of running stores. The retail-media market is projected to grow into a $100-billion-plus global business in the coming years — and the Vibe.co deal is a sign it is consolidating around large platform owners rather than independent ad-tech firms.
