Walmart announced an agreement to buy Vizio today. Irvine, California-based Vizio is best known for lower-priced TVs, but its real value to Walmart is its advertising business and access to user data.

Walmart said it's buying Vizio for approximately $2.3 billion, pending regulatory clearance and additional closing conditions. Vizio can also terminate the transaction over the next 45 days if it accepts a better offer, per the announcement.

Walmart will keep selling non-Vizio TVs should the merger close, Seth Dallaire, Walmart US' EVP and CRO who would manage Vizio post-acquisition, told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Walmart expects the acquisition to close as soon as this summer, it told WSJ.

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Walmart, including Sam's Club, is typically Vizio's biggest customer by sales, per a WSJ report last week on the potential merger. But Walmart's acquisition isn't about getting a bigger piece of the budget-TV market (Walmart notably already sells its own "onn." budget TVs). Instead, Walmart is looking to boost its Walmart Connect advertising business.

Vizio makes money by selling ads, including those shown on the Vizio SmartCast OS and on free content available on its TVs with ads. Walmart said buying Vizio will give it new ways to appeal to advertisers and that those ad efforts would be further fueled by Walmart's high-volume sales of TVs.

Walmart said today that Vizio's Platform+ ad business has "over 500 direct advertiser relationships, including many of the Fortune 500" and that SmartCast users have grown 400 percent since 2018 to 18 million active accounts.

Walmart Connect (which was rebranded from Walmart Media Group in 2021) sells various types of ads, including adverts that appear on Walmart's website and app. Walmart Connect also sells ads that display on in-store screens, including display TVs and point-of-sale machines, in over 4,700 locations (Walmart has over 10,500 stores).

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Walmart makes most of its US revenue from low-profit groceries, WSJ noted last week, but ads are higher profit. Walmart has said that it wants Walmart Connect to be a top-10 advertising business. Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta are among the world's biggest advertising companies today. In the fiscal year ending January 2023, Walmart said that its global ads business represented under 1 percent ($2.7 billion) of its total annual revenue. In its fiscal year 2024 Q4 earnings report released today [PDF], Walmart said its global ad business grew 33 percent, including 22 percent in the US, compared to Q4 2023.

Hungry for customer data

Owning Platform+ would give Walmart new information about TV users. Data gathered from Vizio TVs will be combined with data on shoppers that Walmart already gets. Walmart plans to use this customer data to sell targeted ad space, such as banners above Walmart.com search results, and to help advertisers track ad results.

With people only able to buy so many new TVs, vendors have been pushing for ways to make money off of already-purchased TVs. That means putting ads on TV OSes and TVs that gather customer data, including what users watch and which ads they click on, when possible. TV makers like Vizio, Amazon, and LG are increasingly focusing on ads as revenue streams.

Meanwhile, retailers like Walmart are also turning to ads for revenue. Through Vizio, Walmart is looking to add a business with the vast majority of gross profit coming from ads. Data acquired through SmartCast can shed light on ad effectiveness and improve ad targeting, Vizio tells advertisers.

In an interview with WSJ, Dallaire noted that smart TVs and streaming have turned the TV business into a software, not hardware, business. According to research from Parks and Associates cited by WSJ last week, Vizio has 8 percent of the connected TV OS market share. Roku OS reportedly has more share (25 percent) and is on Walmart's "onn." TVs, but Walmart doesn't own Roku.