Ad tech Briefing: Walmart’s Vibe deal is a reminder not to spend too long courting Madison Avenue

Amid the glamor of star-studded panels and yacht parties aplenty – not to mention a hail of ad tech announcements – last week, Walmart’s acquisition of self-serve CTV platform Vibe.co stood out. 

On paper, the transaction strengthens Walmart Connect’s CTV ambitions, particularly for SMBs, which aligns with the largest retailer in the U.S.’ strategic goal of identifying growth areas where it may increasingly look next. 

Walmart paid big for small spenders

Financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, though sources told Digiday it would value Vibe at $1.4 billion – that’s a staggering amount for a company that’s barely half a decade old. 

From conversations I have had with sources since the June 23 announcement, it’s also a lesson for the legions of ad tech executives who spent the last week showering marketers at blue-chip brands with extravagant niceties on the company credit card, only for the promise of another meeting in return.   

The prestige associated with landing the largest agency holding companies and household-name marketers, such as big-spending brands that spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually, is clear.

And for much of the past decade, many of ad tech’s largest independent players pursued such enterprise accounts at great expense. While large brands offer scale, validation and predictable budgets, they also create complexity.

In the spirit of reflection, we need only look at the tensions that came to light earlier this year between ad tech’s largest independent player, The Trade Desk, and Publicis Groupe.

While the pair have publicly claimed they have now “moved on,” it’s widely understood that the flare-up earlier this year stemmed from the demand-side platform’s direct courtship of brands.   

Going big gets complicated

As enterprise DSPs increasingly pursue client-direct agreements that can (theoretically) command higher commercial terms than agency-negotiated contracts, the likes of Publicis, etc., will naturally question whether platforms are attempting to move further up the value chain – and disintermediate them.

For some, the pursuit of direct relationships with major advertisers is a fool’s errand, given that outfits at The Trade Desk’s scale have already captured much of the enterprise opportunity available to them (via agencies). 

Detractors of the brand-direct strategy argue that such a focus is ultimately a strategic distraction and exposes ad tech companies to new commercial tensions with agency partners.

Concentrating resources on a relatively finite number of global advertisers demands negotiating with each of their demanding procurement processes, bespoke commercial agreements and global leverage. Whereas the industry’s more compelling economic opportunity lies in scaling software for the “long tail” of smaller advertisers.

It worked for Google and Meta…

“The real money is if you can scale,” said one source I spoke with, who declined to be named, pointing to how Google and Meta have built enormous businesses not by depending upon a relatively small collection of paymasters. 

Rather, they chose to enable millions of smaller businesses to advertise with minimal human intervention, and this philosophy helped stoke Walmart’s interest in Vibe – a company that likened itself to the “Google Ads of streaming” when it first announced itself on the global stage in 2024.

Peering under the hood, we can see that rather than acquiring another enterprise platform, Walmart is buying infrastructure designed to make CTV behave more like paid search or paid social, i.e., self-service, simplified and accessible to advertisers without large media teams. 

In effect, this means Walmart is acquiring distribution as much as technology, with the obvious question being whether independent ad tech companies reach the same conclusion.

Less margin, but less pushback

With growth slowing across mature DSP businesses, retail media networks capturing incremental budgets and AI reducing operating costs, the commercial appeal of serving thousands of smaller advertisers looks increasingly attractive. 

While such businesses typically generate lower average contract values, they also require fewer bespoke commercial negotiations, fewer complex agency relationships and can deliver meaningfully higher incremental margins when software rather than people does most of the work.

So, while enterprise advertisers will remain strategically important, Walmart’s Vibe acquisition raises the question of whether independent ad tech will look to customers many overlooked in the first place as the next meaningful growth story.

Numbers to know

• $79.5 million: Vibe’s total funding after its $50 million Series B in 2025
• $100 million: Vibe’s reported accrued recurring revenue (ARR) as of 2025
• $1 billion: The amount AppsFlyer raised in Series E funding from Google, Meta, Moloc and Unity
• $2.7 billion: AppsFlyer’s subsequent valuation

What we covered

Amazon expands media footprint with iHeart sales deal and new TV outcome tool 

Amazon is pushing deeper into the middle of TV and audio ad deals, rolling out a new measurement tool for streamers while tapping iHeartMedia’s 1,000-plus sellers to put its streaming inventory on more media plans. 

The hunt for a post-LiveRamp successor is already underway
The real prize isn’t replacing LiveRamp itself but controlling the infrastructure that connects first-party data, identity, and media activation.

What we heard

“I don’t think I’m a fan of dinners at Cannes, it burns up so much time, and you often get stuck next to some random for four hours when you just want to be out with your friends.”

— An industry veteran says the quiet part out loud.

What we’re reading

Meta culpa

Morale is “probably one of the worst it’s ever been,” said a senior Meta executive, reflecting on the “adding that the business had done an ‘atrocious job’ with its recent restructuring.

AppLovin Ads is now open to all advertisers

AppLovin has fully opened its self-serve advertising platform to all advertisers without requiring a referral code, rebranding the platform as “AppLovin Ads.” 

TV was never built to behave like Meta

That is not surprising. Television companies are fighting for budgets increasingly flowing toward Google and Meta. What is surprising is how completely the industry has started collapsing fundamentally different advertising mediums into the same conversation.