Walmart to acquire Vibe.co
June 24, 2026



Walmart and Vibe.co have entered into an agreement under which Walmart will acquire Vibe.co, a self-serve, connected TV (CTV) advertising platform designed to simplify advertising for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) and mid-market brands. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the expiration or early termination of the applicable waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition advances Walmart’s strategy to build more accessible, full-funnel advertising solutions through Walmart Connect, its commerce media business. By combining Vibe.co’s self-serve CTV platform with Walmart’s commerce audiences, closed-loop measurement and growing media ecosystem, including VIZIO, Walmart Connect aims to help more advertisers launch CTV campaigns and better measure their business impact.


“Walmart Connect is focused on making commerce media more accessible, more measurable and easier to activate for advertisers of all sizes,” said Ryan Mayward, GM and Senior Vice President, Walmart Connect U.S. “Vibe.co has created a purpose-built platform that simplifies streaming TV advertising, and together, we can help more businesses connect with customers across streaming environments while measuring the impact of those campaigns through Walmart’s commerce capabilities.”

Vibe.co’s platform offers self-serve campaign activation, direct supply partner integrations, proprietary advertising technology and performance-driven optimisation that helps advertisers access premium connected TV inventory. The combination is expected to support broader adoption of the CTV ad media among advertisers across Walmart Connect, and the broader connected TV ecosystem, particularly among SMB and mid-market advertisers, including Walmart’s third-party marketplace sellers.

“Vibe.co was built as the self-serve platform for performance and ecommerce marketers to run streaming TV the way they run paid social: measurable, fast to launch, and optimized for better outcomes,” said Arthur Querou, Co-Founder and CEO, Vibe.co. “Joining Walmart gives us the opportunity to accelerate that mission and bring performance TV advertising to one of the most powerful commerce media ecosystems in the market.”

The acquisition is intended to expand advertiser choice and accessibility, not limit how advertisers or partners engage with Walmart Connect’s media ecosystem, noted the companies.

Following the close of the transaction, Vibe.co CEO and Co-Founder Arthur Querou, CTO and Co-Founder Franck Tetzlaff, and the broader Vibe.co team are expected to join Walmart Connect to help maintain business momentum, support a seamless integration and continue serving Vibe.co’s advertisers, publishers and technology partners. Their expertise in connected TV, self-serve activation and performance advertising will serve as valuable additions to the Walmart team.

The parties expect the transaction to close by the end of fiscal year 2027.

Reacting to the news, Leif Welch, CEO of JamLoop, said: “Performance CTV is moving from the edge of the media plan to the center of the growth conversation. Large platforms are investing here because advertisers are asking for more than reach. They want streaming TV to be easier to activate, easier to measure, and tied to outcomes they can defend.Walmart’s acquisition of Vibe validates that shift. With VIZIO, Walmart Connect, commerce data, and now Vibe, Walmart is building a powerful CTV and retail media ecosystem. But the more the market consolidates around large platforms, the more independence matters for advertisers that want flexibility, transparency, and control across channels and markets. The mid-market is now a major battleground. Vibe’s positioning has centered on performance marketers, SMBs, and self-service. Walmart’s language reinforces the same point: advertisers want CTV to be more accessible, more measurable, and more accountable to growth.”

According to Jesse Math, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Keen Decision Systems, Walmart’s acquisition of Vibe.co is less about a new capability and more about ownership and access.

While Walmart has had a CTV offering for years through The Trade Desk, Walmart now owns the activation and measurement layer directly, and Vibe’s self-serve model brings that capability to a broader set of advertisers who couldn’t meet the thresholds or complexity of the previous approach.

“For Vibe, the unlock is equally significant: Walmart’s deterministic purchase data complements and strengthens Vibe’s probabilistic cross-device identity graph, making the match between ad exposure and real-world outcome more reliable than either could achieve alone,” he says. “Together, the promise is a more complete picture of omnichannel RoI, one that captures how spend within Walmart creates halo on direct channels, and how spend outside of Walmart feeds velocity back into Walmart. That’s meaningful progress.”

“But the decision sitting above all of it just got harder. Walmart will use this stronger measurement story to ask more of its advertising partners, more budget, more commitment, deeper integration across its full ecosystem. That’s a rational ask. And it lands inside a planning problem that was already complex: what’s the right amount to spend with Walmart versus Amazon versus Kroger? What’s the right balance between retail media and Google Search and Meta? What’s the right split between on-platform Walmart investment and off-platform?”

“Vibe gives Walmart advertisers a stronger signal for day-to-day optimisation within that ecosystem. It does not answer the question that sits above it. Every retailer and media platform is building a more compelling closed loop. None of those loops connect to each other. And the more powerful each individual signal becomes, the more pressure it creates on brands to make sense of all of them together. What’s needed is a closed loop that bisects all the other closed loops, one that can hold Walmart next to Amazon next to Meta next to search and tell a brand not just what happened, but what to do next. That capability doesn’t live inside any single ad or retail platform. It never will,” he concludes.

According to Jesse Math, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Keen Decision Systems, Walmart’s acquisition of Vibe.co is less about a new capability and more about ownership and access.

“While Walmart has had a CTV offering for years through The Trade Desk, Walmart now owns the activation and measurement layer directly, and Vibe’s self-serve model brings that capability to a broader set of advertisers who couldn’t meet the thresholds or complexity of the previous approach.”

“For Vibe, the unlock is equally significant: Walmart’s deterministic purchase data complements and strengthens Vibe’s probabilistic cross-device identity graph, making the match between ad exposure and real-world outcome more reliable than either could achieve alone,” he says. “Together, the promise is a more complete picture of omnichannel RoI, one that captures how spend within Walmart creates halo on direct channels, and how spend outside of Walmart feeds velocity back into Walmart. That’s meaningful progress.”

“But the decision sitting above all of it just got harder. Walmart will use this stronger measurement story to ask more of its advertising partners, more budget, more commitment, deeper integration across its full ecosystem. That’s a rational ask. And it lands inside a planning problem that was already complex: what’s the right amount to spend with Walmart versus Amazon versus Kroger? What’s the right balance between retail media and Google Search and Meta? What’s the right split between on-platform Walmart investment and off-platform?”

“Vibe gives Walmart advertisers a stronger signal for day-to-day optimisation within that ecosystem. It does not answer the question that sits above it. Every retailer and media platform is building a more compelling closed loop. None of those loops connect to each other. And the more powerful each individual signal becomes, the more pressure it creates on brands to make sense of all of them together. What’s needed is a closed loop that bisects all the other closed loops, one that can hold Walmart next to Amazon next to Meta next to search and tell a brand not just what happened, but what to do next. That capability doesn’t live inside any single ad or retail platform. It never will,” he concludes.

Keynes’ CMO TJ Hunter says he has stopped paying attention to what companies say about CTV and started paying attention to what they’re buying, suggesting that nobody spends this kind of money on a trend.

“What’s striking is that, in less than two weeks, we’ve seen two major deals that all point in the same direction. Whether the focus is audience intelligence, commerce data, or direct consumer relationships, the underlying bet looks remarkably similar: streaming TV is becoming a strategic business asset, not just an advertising channel.”

“That’s why I think this Walmart-Vibe deal is more significant than it might appear on the surface. Walmart clearly sees an opportunity to bring more advertisers into the CTV ecosystem, but it also reinforces a bigger shift that’s happening across the industry. Companies are increasingly viewing streaming TV as a place where media, commerce, data, and customer engagement intersect.”

“You can learn a lot about where an industry is headed by looking at what companies are willing to pay for. Right now, the signals are pretty hard to miss. We may look back on this stretch as the moment CTV stopped being viewed as an emerging channel and started being viewed as core infrastructure.”