What: The retailer’s ad business rebranded as ‘Walmart Connect’, saw a triple-digit growth last quarter, a high-margin endeavour capitalizing on mountains of shopping data.

Why is it important: Walmart is leveraging its capabilities by using its data asset.

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Walmart has continued to expand its access to consumers by ramping up kerbside pickup and delivery services, and unrolling its Walmart+ subscription delivery program. The retailer estimates that each week, roughly 265 million customers visit its stores and online all over the world. The company has increasingly sought to leverage this base by rolling out and expanding offerings beyond retail, including in advertising, financial services and health care.

Walmart has been in the advertising business in some form for decades, where its thousands of stores in the U.S. facilitated various exercises in brand advertising. Having a specific new branded platform around those advertising efforts makes it easier to promote that advertising business in a more focused way.

What Walmart has sought to highlight to brands is not just its access to consumer data based on shopping transactions, but also the technology to process that data. Such technology can help to draw connections between the on- and offline behaviours of consumers, and to analyse the purchase journeys of millions of consumers to identify patterns and anticipate needs. The appeal of such a service is especially strong for small businesses whose marketing resources are limited.

This kind of ability to synthesize a large volume of consumer information also introduces some privacy and security concerns for consumers. Walmart said in a statement that the retailer neither provides data about individual customers, nor sells that information.

Walmart Leverages Tech, Proximity to Shoppers to Boost Ad Business