When You Are in the Ad Business, Every Flat Surface Is a Billboard ⇥ ft.com

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.

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Walmart’s proposed Vizio acquisition is an obvious example of how eager retailers and advertisers are to access data collected from TVs. Through its Platform+ business unit, Vizio was one of the first OEMs to focus more business on ad sales and tracking than hardware.

Gregory Meyer, Financial Times:

Yet Walmart disclosed in an earnings release this week that its US advertising business had grown 30 per cent in the past year, rocketing past the growth rate of the company as a whole.

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“After you click on an ad at a general-purpose search engine, they don’t know what you did after that,” said Ryan Mayward, senior vice-president of retail media sales at Walmart US. “We capture the click and we also know that you checked out and bought those specific things after you were exposed [to] or interacted with the ads. That’s the core value [proposition] of retail media versus other types of media.”

Mayward told Meyer Walmart intends to install screens throughout its stores: at department counters, on dedicated wall space, and at checkstands. All of these are primarily for ads. If there was ever a time retailers were worried about how tacky this would look, those days are over. Instead, every digital and physical surface is an opportunity for showing a typically ugly ad.

But all this is an evolution of existing tolerances. Ads already play over the in-store speaker system. Manufacturers already pay retailers slotting fees to get products on shelves; paying for ad space is another negotiating opportunity. Ad views are already linked to credit card transactions. Television is ad-supported and so is streaming. This is just more — and worse. I cannot imagine any person wants to be increasingly surrounded by aggressive and distracting ads; our built environment is planned by cynical people who also surely do not want to live in the world they are creating.