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

Wait, why are the Oh,

cuz all the lawyers are in the S-classes in the hospital parking lot cuz the cuz they're chasing the ambulances to get the to get the personal injury attorney. This is the the famous ambulance chaser joke.

Any blah blah blah blah blah. We got Arthur from Vibe. Welcome back to the show, Arthur. Great to see you.

Hey guys, how are you?

How you doing? Always good to catch up with you. What's the latest? What's the latest? Well, look,

are you here to correct the record about your your your fake joke quitting? You got to set the record straight that you do in fact.

I got in so much trouble. I got in so much trouble. First tweet I do, post acquisition from Walmart, billion dollar acquisition. I say I quit.

They freaked out. They freaked out.

I freaked out cuz I read it. I read it just randomly in the timeline. I was like, "Oh, wow." Like Arthur's out. And then I didn't You obviously a joke. It was like perfect meme. If you're in tech, you understood that it was a reference to Jacob Coxin, the AI researcher who quit anthropic and went on national news tour for it. Uh but yes, lots of people uh didn't have all of that context. So, good to correct the record. Still going strong in Vibe, still going strong at Walmart. Uh how separate are the are the two organizations today? Are you in the same building? Are you are you moving things together? What's what's the day-to-day like?

No, we're still in our building still some kind of an independent uh company. So,

but

but uh we're supercharged uh by Walmart and it's been pretty amazing. It's always scary to join such a large

They're backing the truck up for you. I like it. We needed that.

We needed that.

So, yeah, it's great.

Um

so, today we're announcing the Walmart audiences.

Okay.

Y

fantastic. Congratulations.

Okay. So, what does that what does that mean? Uh what does that mean for for business owners?

Yeah. So,

how do we make money off of this?

Huh? How do we make money off of this? I have a DTOC brand. Am I going to use Walmart audiences to grow my brand? How how do I profit?

Yeah. So, basically, this is some kind of a meta advertising moment. Uh Walmart audiences. So, you know, Walmart has half a billion uh SKs in their catalog and now all these buying signals, whether it is people who have intend to buy or people who are regular buyers of product, you can target them based on what they've bought directly on streaming TV. So that gets like hyper precision for performance marketers. Our mission has always been to transform TV advertising as an acquisition channel for performance marketers and now it's even more real. So it's super super exciting. This is the first time in history that TV is so enabled um by commerce signals. So if you're if you have a DTC brand, you can now target like competitors product those kind of things. It opens up to tons of crazy and super cool use cases for TV advertising.

Yeah.

Very cool. Yeah. There's like a bunch of companies that I'm going to send this to.

How excited are you about uh I know you probably can't speak specifically for Walmart's strategy here, but just you're on the team that's open for business in the AI agent commerce era and it feels like there's clearly a world where you're doing connected TV advertising. You see something, there might be a QR code, but it's a lot easier to text your agent, go buy that for me, and Walmart's open for business. Is this exciting for you? I don't I I'm not trying to get a scoop. I know you're not

very exciting. What I what I what I can say uh is that AI leadership is led by Daniel Danker. Uh and so it's super exciting to have someone so experienced, so knowledgeable on the on the topic. I know Walmart released um their agentic profiles um

to open up agentic commerce uh a few days ago. Yeah. Uh and so that shows the kind of vision they have and super cool ambition they have around AI in general and being part of such a such actually a tech company. I think this is what the most surprising thing about Walmart. It's a tech company at the end of

Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Um

uh and so being part of them uh is really awesome.

Yeah. It feels like there's probably a lot of interesting like like Vibe is a very technative company like a true startup, right? Uh and then you go into a company that's you know very old but it has leaned in especially in the AI agentic commerce era. Uh are you having opportunities to to uh to merge different teams or do little sprints with folks from your team that might bring some fresh blood to a Walmart team hop in a group and discuss what you're seeing in from your perspective and merge that with them and and bring that has that been one of the add-ons of the acquisition?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We so right now we mostly work with the Walmart connect people which is the advertising division from Walmart but this is exactly what's been happening and we share uh our best practices they also have you know a lot of power uh behind them and firepower so we kind of merge that and it's like it's super exciting uh right now uh and they've been really thoughtful about how to integrate the company and not just tell us like you're now part of Walmart and you work the way we do uh they're more in the way of like help us transform the company so it's crazy exciting

uh Uh what take us through like the the overall health of the TV because we we're all watching Google earnings today being like oh the the the the the default bare case of like people are going to stop searching. It's like sort people are sort of feeling that today. Uh there's obviously people lot of lot of time on their phones. The iPhone Duo gives you even more screen for more screen time maybe. Um but is TV still growing? Is it still dominant? like what what metrics do you use to ground the conversations that you're having at Walmart around how much you should be investing in connected TV generally?

Yeah, what's funny is that there are two worlds in television right now. There is u the big advertisers who have always been on TV. Uh they all pretty much moved their dollars, their advertising dollars from linear and cable TV to streaming TV and are still in progress of doing that. This is much a given and this is not necessarily like the biggest growth momentum that TV uh that streaming TV is seeing because it's at the end of the day still the same dollars. But what we're seeing and what we've been leading uh is that new market of smaller brands uh were wanting to scale outside of just like search and social. They want to do more and TV has the reach. TV has the target ability especially now with uh the commerce signals. it has the measurability as well which which has been the big issue of television uh for years. Uh and so now everyone uh in DTC in performance marketing in general is starting to realize that oh my god there is reach I can spend a lot of money and I can get a lot of performance from there. So they're putting more and more money and this is where the most of the growth uh from that market is coming from.

Are you talking to early stage founders? I mean, I I remember there was someone on a podcast who was like, "If you only have your first million dollars to spend, you got to do it on Meta or whatever, which is sort of like, you know, the default DOC playbook." But, uh, how early are you seeing founders and entrepreneurs who are starting like a small Shopify site and they just want to get their first customers? Are they coming in as soon as they're spending $10,000 a month on advertising, hundred,000? Like, what is the sweet spot to sort of get into this market? I I'll put it differently. When you start advertising, you should focus on capturing the high intent.

Yeah.

Um so this is why Google has been so great. This was meta has been so great as well. Um and TV was lacking that a bit like even if we do performance it was for later stage when you had maxed out uh search when you had maxed out social and this is why we're so excited about today's announcement with Walmart audience because we have that super high intent. you sell lipstick. I you can now target um uh pl uh so

sorry

the the internet is here. Uh the internet is here and you can target it.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch.

Amazing launch.

Great to catch up with you.

Yeah. Going to send this to at least a few founders that I think should get on it for sure.

Big big breakthrough.

Please do. Thank you so much, guys.

Have a great rest of your day. Great to see you.

Goodbye.

And that is most of our show. Jordy, is there any other breaking news? Anything we got to go through? Any bangers? Any breaking news? Anything? Xbox revenue. I like Asha, CEO of Xbox, sharing uh some some like not great news, but just being very upfront about it. You saw this. She said in Q1, Xbox revenue declined 2% year-over-year compared with a 10% decline a quarter ago, while our accountability margin improved. Minecraft and WoW Forever set records. Call of Duty has most acclaimed release in more than a decade and our PC platform revenue grew double digits. Console sales remain constrained by supply with more demand than consoles available. We're working to get more consoles into players hands through in uh including through our expanding refurbishment program. We're making progress with a lot more work ahead. Sort of just a like a tell it like it is moment going direct. Uh I thought this was interesting especially because Asha has to speak to two audiences on X. It's both the investor community, the tech community, and the gaming community. Yeah. Uh and so, uh very very hard line to walk, but I I thought this post was like, yeah, it was like honest and informative and gets me up to speed. And uh it's not it's not just uh completely uh what they astroturfing. Oh, everything's better. It's the best it's ever been when like no, revenue is still declining a little bit. There's a lot of work to be done, but be leading with that, not burying that. That was good. Corporate comps. I liked it. Uh, Intel down 19% after hours. They had earnings.

Uh, and uh,

yeah, Bubble Boy, who was, you know, the big Intel bull, uh, is in in some hot water this week,

but I it's it looked like he uh was out of jail because his account got de uh deactivated.

De Wait, deactivated or reactivated? yesterday. It looked allegedly like he'd been

uh booked in jail,

but his account was active.

His account was active.

Oh, so you're saying if you go to jail, you can't deactivate your account.

It could be tough.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. In my mind, it's like the first thing you do when you go to jail is they deactivate your account. They ban you. But that's not how it works. We're not in the cyberpunk future yet where you're eliminated from the social media world.

Uh fascinating. Well, uh I mean the market in overall is in a rough spot. Uh the NASDAQ is down 1.3%. The Dow is down uh 0.25%. Uh the headline Alphabet sheds half a trillion in market value in the stocks. Worst day ever. These best day ever, worst day ever headlines are are increasingly common. The swings are are crazier than they've ever been. There's a lot going on. Uh but we'll cover it here on the show. So, thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Tyler, you want to take us out with a truth nuke? You didn't get much time on the show today, honestly, other than yourself beginning. Yeah. Sort of laring Jordy over there. But we got a Duke.

We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Bye.