Vibe launches Walmart audience targeting for connected TV — commerce signals meet streaming ads

Walmart Audiences

Vibe.co is launching Walmart Audiences, a product that lets DTC and performance marketers target connected TV viewers using Walmart's purchase intent and buyer signals drawn from its half-billion-SKU catalog. The core idea is straightforward: if you sell lipstick, you can now target people who have bought or shown intent to buy similar products, and reach them on streaming TV rather than just search or social.

Arthur Querou frames this as the first time TV advertising has been meaningfully enabled by commerce signals at this scale. The use cases he points to include targeting competitors' buyers directly — the kind of precision that until now belonged to Meta and Google, not television.

“Walmart has half a billion SKUs in their catalog. And now all these buying signals, whether it is people who have intent to buy or people who are regular buyers of product, you can target them based on what they've bought directly on streaming TV. This is the first time in history that TV is so enabled by commerce signals.”

The market Vibe is betting on

Querou draws a clear line between two CTV growth stories. Large advertisers shifting budgets from linear and cable to streaming are moving existing dollars, not new ones. The real growth engine, in his view, is smaller DTC brands that have maxed out search and social and are looking for reach. CTV now offers them three things that historically kept it out of the performance marketing playbook: reach, targetability, and measurability. Walmart Audiences is designed to sharpen all three.

On timing, Querou argues that early-stage founders should start with high-intent channels like Google and Meta, and layer in CTV later. Walmart Audiences compresses that timeline by bringing intent-level signals to TV, which he says makes CTV a viable performance channel earlier in a brand's lifecycle.

Inside the Walmart integration

Vibe was acquired by Walmart and operates as a largely independent unit within Walmart Connect, Walmart's advertising division. Querou describes the integration as collaborative rather than directive — Walmart has asked Vibe to help transform the company rather than simply conform to existing processes. The two teams share best practices, with Vibe contributing startup speed and Walmart providing scale and commercial firepower.

Querou also nods to Walmart's broader AI ambitions, pointing to the company's recently released agentic commerce profiles as evidence of where the parent company is headed. The implication, though Querou stops short of stating it explicitly, is that Vibe's CTV targeting capability sits naturally inside a future where consumers interact with commerce through AI agents rather than search bars.