Advertising: US retail giant WALMART acquires French adtech VIBE for €1.2 billion to step up its challenge to AMAZON

Advertising: Walmart’s push to build a media empire

The world’s largest retailer is no longer content just selling products — it wants to sell audience too.

According to the Wall Street Journal, citing sources close to the matter, Walmart is preparing to acquire the French company Vibe.co for approximately $1.4 billion, or nearly €1.2 billion. The deal would include a $1.2 billion payment to shareholders, plus an earn-out of roughly $180 million designed to retain key executives after the transaction.

The announcement comes two years after Walmart’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio. At first glance, this looks like just another adtech acquisition — in reality, Walmart is pursuing a far more ambitious strategy: building an advertising business capable of rivaling Amazon’s.

The battle between retail giants is no longer fought only over shelves, warehouses, or delivery times — it’s now being fought on screens.

Walmart wants to become a media company

By harnessing the browsing and purchase data of hundreds of millions of consumers, Amazon has built one of the most profitable advertising businesses in the world. Amazon Ads now generates tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and is one of the group’s most profitable engines.

In response, Walmart has gradually built its own platform, Walmart Connect.

The goal is simple: turn customer transaction data into advertising inventory. Every search, every purchase, and every consumption pattern can become a commercial signal that brands can act on.

The problem is that Amazon holds a considerable advantage: its advertising ecosystem already spans online commerce, video streaming, connected TVs, and a significant share of American digital consumption.

Walmart needed to widen its playing field.

Why connected TV has become strategic

Connected TV is now one of the most coveted markets in the advertising industry — a trend driven above all by usage. Streaming now accounts for nearly 45% of TV viewership in the United States, surpassing traditional broadcast and cable combined. Advertising budgets are gradually following that shift.

Advertisers are also facing another phenomenon: saturation of legacy channels. Acquisition costs are rising on social media, and competition on Google is fierce. As a result, brands are looking for new growth avenues. Connected TV looks like a credible alternative, since it combines the reach of traditional television with the targeting and measurement capabilities of digital.

It’s precisely on this promise that Vibe built its growth.

Founded in 2022 between Paris and New York by Arthur Querou and Franck Tetzlaff, the company aims to make advertising on connected TV as simple as running a campaign on Meta or Google.

Its platform lets advertisers launch, manage, and measure their campaigns from a single interface, with a strong emphasis on automation and artificial intelligence.

A second success story

This isn’t Arthur Querou’s first entrepreneurial venture — before Vibe, he co-founded KMTX, an adtech company acquired by Seedtag. Rather than continuing to run a profitable business, the founders chose to start from scratch.

Pauline Roux, a partner at Elaia and a long-time investor in the company, sums up that decision: selling a profitable business to start over with just intellectual property and little starting capital was a bold move.

That decision now looks like the true starting point of the Walmart deal.

The founders’ conviction was that connected TV would follow an evolution comparable to what search and then social media went through: shifting from a brand-exposure medium to a performance medium.

A trajectory that caught Walmart’s eye

The other decisive factor is speed of execution. In 2025, Vibe announced it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

According to information obtained by FW.MEDIA from a source close to the matter, the company has now reached around $250 million in ARR and is targeting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2027.

That’s a growth rate few European-founded companies can match — Pauline Roux notes revenue has tripled year-over-year, with no notable slowdown.

This momentum explains the timing of the deal: Walmart isn’t buying a mature company that has hit its growth ceiling, but one that still claims strong acceleration ahead.

What Walmart is really buying

Technology is only part of the equation — the strategic value lies in combining several assets. On one side, Walmart holds some of the richest transactional data in the U.S. market, with millions of purchases flowing through its stores and platforms every day.

On the other, Vizio provides a gateway into American households through connected TVs and their operating system. Vibe adds a software layer on top, capable of managing ad campaigns, automating their delivery, and measuring their performance.

As a result, a brand will be able to run an ad on a connected TV, track a consumer’s exposure to it, and then measure that campaign’s impact on actual sales at Walmart.

For twenty years, advertisers have wanted to directly link advertising to transactions. The convergence of Vibe, Vizio, and Walmart Connect brings Walmart closer to delivering on that promise.