Walmart said Tuesday it has agreed to acquire Vibe.co, a Paris-based platform that lets businesses buy and create streaming-television ads, as the retail giant pushes deeper into the fast-growing, high-margin business of selling advertising.

In a June 23 release, the company said Vibe.co’s self-serve connected-TV platform will fold into Walmart Connect, its commerce media business, making TV advertising more accessible and measurable for small and mid-sized businesses. Ryan Mayward, the senior vice president who runs Walmart Connect U.S., said the goal is to make TV advertising “more measurable and easier to activate for advertisers of all sizes.”

Terms were not officially disclosed, though one trade publication reported a price near $1.4 billion.

The deal reflects a quiet but profound shift in how Walmart makes money. Best known as one of the nation’s biggest retailers, Walmart is increasingly looking to become a major seller of advertising too. Grocery and general-merchandise sales carry thin margins; advertising is far richer. When Walmart sells ad space — on its site, in its app, on store screens, and now on streaming TV — the profits help keep shelf prices low while still growing earnings.

It is following the path Amazon blazed in turning ads into a profit engine.

Vibe.co fills a specific gap. Connected TV can reach huge audiences, but buying those ads has traditionally been complicated and costly, often putting it out of reach for smaller businesses. Arthur Querou, Vibe.co’s chief executive and co-founder, said the company was built to make streaming-TV advertising work more like paid social media — fast, measurable and optimized — and that joining Walmart lets it bring “performance TV advertising to one of the most powerful commerce media ecosystems in the market.”

Querou and co-founder Franck Tetzlaff are expected to join Walmart Connect.

The acquisition builds directly on Walmart’s $2 billion purchase of Vizio, which closed less than two years ago. Vizio gives Walmart a foothold in millions of living rooms and a stream of viewing data. Vibe.co gives it the tools to sell ads against that audience and prove they work.

Because Walmart can tie an ad to a later purchase through its “closed-loop” measurement system, it can offer advertisers something most media companies cannot: a direct link between a commercial and a sale.

The biggest target is small business. Many of Walmart’s third-party marketplace sellers are small and mid-sized brands that would never buy a national television commercial. By making streaming ads cheaper and easier to use, Walmart can sell advertising to those sellers and other small brands — a vast pool bigger media platforms often overlook.

For Main Street businesses, it could mean access to television-style advertising once reserved for large corporations.

For shoppers, the trend is double-edged. More sophisticated advertising means the products promoted on their televisions and phones are increasingly tailored to them, drawing on what Walmart knows about shopping habits and purchasing behavior. That can make ads more relevant, but it also extends the reach of a company that already tracks an enormous share of American consumer spending.

Roughly 280 million customers visit Walmart’s more than 10,900 stores and websites each week, creating a trove of consumer data few rivals can match.

The transaction is subject to antitrust review under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act and is expected to close by the end of Walmart’s 2027 fiscal year, with no impact to sales or operating-income guidance.

It came a day after Walmart said it was consolidating its advertising operations into a single framework — a sign of how central the ad business has become to a company most Americans still think of simply as a place to buy groceries.

As retail media becomes one of Walmart’s key growth engines, deals like this show how the line between a retailer and a media company continues to blur.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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