7 Things That Hit This Week: Walmart’s Blockbuster M&A, Pacvue Goes Offsite, and ChatGPT Ads Grow

Retail and commerce media leaders have been all over the Croisette this week, pitching their streaming and offsite ad partnerships in an attempt to prove that retailers of all sizes can drive both sales and broader brand-building goals for marketers, not just Amazon. This week’s flurry of announcements show a future where commerce media takes a more central role in the marketing plan.

This is the second installment of a roundup of the commerce news, observations, and tidbits that came across my desk (and into my DMs) this week. We’re publishing them weekly on Fridays from now on, though we’ll be off next week for the Fourth of July. If there’s something you think should be included, email me.

1. Walmart dropped $1.4 billion on a streaming ad platform

Walmart’s next streaming acquisition was as costly as it was buzzy. The company announced that it plans to acquire Vibe.co, a company that sells connected TV ads to small- and medium-sized businesses.

I reported on how buying Vibe.co could impact its efforts to catch up with Amazon. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart paid a whopping $1.4 billion on Vibe.co, showing the big investments that Walmart and others are taking to fend off Amazon.

2. After cutting minimum spend requirements by 80%, Criteo says 2,000 advertisers are buying ChatGPT ads through its platform

From its yacht in the Cannes harbor, Criteo announced on Monday that 2,000 advertisers are now buying ads through its platform to run on ChatGPT. 

Criteo and OpenAI announced the tie-up in March, bringing ad inventory within ChatGPT to Criteo’s advertisers, who buy ads across more than 200 retail media networks. 

Earlier this month, ADWEEK’s Trishla Ostwal reported that Criteo slashed the minimum spend requirement for advertisers looking to test ChatGPT ads from $50,000 to just $10,000. (StackAdapt, a rival ad tech firm also selling ChatGPT ads, dropped its spend threshold altogether in May). Seems like it worked. 

3. Pacvue goes offsite

Pacvue, a large retail adtech firm that helps brands manage ad campaigns across more than 100 ecommerce channels including Amazon, Walmart, and Reddit, is now expanding its reach to offsite retail media. 

The company’s new product, Pacvue Prism, brings ad buying and campaign measurement across verticals within the same portal. Pacvue is pitching itself as a simplified way to access the full marketing funnel. Pacvue has also recently announced integrations with The Trade Desk, Pinterest, and OpenAI.

“We took a step back and worked with our customers to design a product that’s more consolidated, especially as we move into these more upper-funnel channels like display, social, CTV,” explained Anne Harrell, senior director of strategic projects at Pacvue.

As retail media demand follows inventory that becomes more widely available in platforms like Pacvue, that could mean the retailers drop their own managed-service offering, which requires costly overhead, explained Derek Nelson, senior director of retail media consulting at Ovative Group.

For ad buyers who’d rather do all their buying in a single platform, Pacvue’s product potentially makes their jobs a whole lot easier. Buying through a retailer’s self-service or managed service portal is generally a cumbersome extra step that’s necessary to get certain measurement insights or bespoke ad inventory. If that’s all available in Pacvue, that reduces time and resource demands. If enough ad buyers opt out of retailers’ managed service, retailers might choose to stop offering it altogether, Nelson told me.

“Retail media networks are always having conversations about where demand is, and will be, coming from. There could be some real cost-savings that come from reduced managed service demand,” he said.

4. Amazon Retail Ad Service (finally) signs another client

Last year, Amazon unveiled a new pitch. Retailers hungry for some of the fat margins that advertising can offer to their bottom line could use Amazon’s tools to sell ads on their websites. The offering, called Amazon Retail Ad Service, was met with skepticism from many industry observers. Why, they wondered, would any retailer turn over valuable product data to their biggest competitor?

While Amazon launched with a few ecommerce players, it took several months before signing Macy’s as its first traditional retailer client.

Now, nearly a year after the Macy’s deal was announced, Amazon has another client in U.K. grocery retailer Asda. 

“This partnership is about using technology to improve the online shopping experience by helping them to quickly find what they need,” Rachel Eyre, Asda’s chief customer and digital officer, said in a statement. “It creates a stronger retail media proposition, giving our current and future brand partners a more effective way to reach customers, using deeper insight to deliver impactful and measurable campaigns.”

5. Stratacache sold Scala to a Swedish retail media firm

After liquidating its U.K. business in May, in-store retail firm Stratacache quietly offloaded another of its properties.

The company sold digital signage firm Scala to Swedish in-store retail media company Versiteit, the latter firm announced on May 20. Stratacache acquired Scala in 2018.

6. Best Buy touts its fancy new TVs

TV tech has gotten better, and Best Buy built a whole new ad campaign around it. 

Two ads dropped this week in an effort to get more people in stores to see the new screens, called RGB LED TVs. Best Buy is selling the TVs exclusively through its stores, website, and app. RGB LED TV screens have thousands of precision dimming zones and dedicated red, green, and blue LEDs. That makes the colors more lifelike and vibrant, according to Best Buy, and the screens are the brightest on the market. 

7. La Vie en Rosé

As a little treat, I’ve got a few nuggets of insight from commerce media folks on the ground in Cannes.

After hanging with Walmart’s Linda Lomelino, Mike Feldman, Flywheel’s svp of commerce, had this to say about the retailer’s recent slate of announcements: 

“Walmart is increasingly focused on helping brands move beyond reporting toward better business decision-making. The Vizio/Walmart content-to-commerce work is especially interesting because it shows the next step: Commerce media is branded content, shoppable entertainment, and measurable retail outcomes connected in one system—not just sponsored search or display.”

Elsewhere on the Croisette, two separate retail media adtech execs voiced similar observations about all the agentic-themed announcements in Cannes: Most of the tools getting fancy press releases are hypothetical and haven’t been built yet.

One of the sources went a step further, saying that many leaders are realizing that AI without specific use cases applied is an “absolute wasteful disaster.” The source added that what AI is adding to the bottom line remains a sobering reality check halfway through 2026.