What Rich Lehrfeld’s media buying background means for Walmart RMN business

To sell its retail media network to advertisers, Walmart Connect placed its bet on Rich Lehrfeld, svp and general manager of Walmart Connect. He’s got a background in media buying, switching to selling media after a 25-year-run and giving him experience on both sides of the aisle. Lehrfeld joined Walmart as svp of brand marketing, creative and media back in 2019 before moving to Walmart Connect in October 2020, according to LinkedIn.

“How do I work within a big retail company? And I feel very lucky because the leadership got it and understood if we do it the right way, we do it in a customer-centric way, it can really add value,” Lehfeld said, explaining how his background helps Walmart’s sales strategy. 

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

The RMN boom

I’ve been a media buyer for a very long time, and the notion of being able to have an entity or a platform that you can get unique insights and unique audiences, an easy to use platform at scale that can engage customers, that can deliver tremendous value to consumers and customers and that have deep insights and measurement, that is why it’s growing so much.

Building out the toolkit 

We are full-service, in-house. We have a sales team, we have a marketing team, we have an operations team, we have product team, obviously engineering teams and data and analytic teams. When we originally started, we had a lot of team members that were really good at performance – probably more commerce, media, shopper marketing relationships. We started really working with the commerce people or the business people or the commercial people at our suppliers. As we started to expand into mid-funnel, upper-funnel, off-platform stuff, we started having to talk to different types of people.

‘Self-service is critical‘

The notion of automation, the notion of self service, is critical. If you look at the largest media platforms, there’s been programmatic, there’s been auction, there’s been self-serve, there’s been transparency in pricing. That’s where the world has been starting to move towards. Also, we had to build an easy-to-use platform that clients could come on and access at scale, because we want to make sure we’re supporting our largest [first-party] suppliers, but also all the way down to the smallest [third-party] suppliers.