Walmart’s expanded data offering to agencies and advertisers gets closer to self-serve

The API offers up what it calls “non-media, omnichannel signals” that help advertisers understand activity across Walmart’s online and in-store commerce independent of ad activation. The insights include near real-time updates on inventory and availability, store-level trends, and regional performance, without having to go through the supplier.  

While the offering is not completely self-serve, it’s getting there, said Linda Lomelino, vp of product, data ventures & advertising at Walmart.

“That’s where the goodness really lies: being able to plan, optimize, measure in a very different way,” said Lomelino. “The suppliers/advertisers permission their partners into this ecosystem, but instead of having to manually hand over data to their agency or their tech partner, they can actually now start streaming the data.” 

Lomelino believes the sheer volume of the expanded Scintilla data feed should generate demand. “It’s almost 500 retail metrics and insights that these tech partners and agencies haven’t had access to and they’re well beyond what I would call traditional media measurement insights. Because it’s total retail performance, it’s omni channel.”

One agency holding company that’s been fortunate enough to have initial access to Walmart’s data is Omnicom, thanks to a series of partnerships Walmart and Omnicom have struck over the last two years. Still, Mike Feldman, svp of commerce with Omnicom’s commerce arm Flywheel, said the value of in-store data and insights is what gives this feed extra oomph. 

“It’s an incredibly powerful tool for not just ad attributed but for what is our total marketing doing to drive the total Walmart ecosystem — that’s a much more powerful story than just ad attributed data.,” said Feldman, who went out of his way to also praise the depth of Amazon’s data (Omnicom is a major agency partner of Amazon). “Think about the in-store data that Walmart has. Think about the different modalities and the consumers.” 

To Feldman’s way of thinking, the ubiquity of Walmart to the American shopper gives Scintilla even more power. “The American consumer is Walmart, so now we can see the entire purchase behavior of those people across every touchpoint,” he explained, citing regional insights, online vs in-store penetration and other stats that can impact how to advertise.. “And don’t even get me started on what Vizio can then go and do to that.”

That Vizio data, said Lomelino, is not yet part of what Scintilla’s API offers now, but she didn’t deny it could get folded in at some point in the future.

Lomelino shared an example of a CPG client that had been losing customers to a competitor in a particular area (she declined to identify the advertiser or region), which used Scintilla’s expanded API. 

In a blog post announcing the new effort, Lomelino described the client’s success rate. “The brand delivered: 2.97% sales lift across targeted markets, 2.1 million households reached with 18.62 times higher impression delivery in targeted markets, [and a] 72% win-back rate among returning buyers, with 31% new buyer acquisition.”