Walmart Teams With Disney in Race Against Amazon for Streamers’ Spending

As retail behemoths Amazon and Walmart compete for consumers’ spending, both are turning to video streaming ads to open up new sales opportunities and drive conversion.

On Wednesday (May 8), Disney Advertising announced a partnership with Walmart Connect, the superstore chain’s retail media platform, to enable targeted advertising using the retailer’s data.

“Combining Walmart’s unique omnichannel customer insights with the incredible scale and reach of Disney+ and Hulu content is a huge unlock for marketers,” Ryan Mayward, Walmart Connect’s senior vice president of retail media sales, said in a statement. “Approximately 145 million customers shop with us online and in stores weekly. Now, marketers will be able to apply those insights to their full-funnel campaigns to reach customers wherever they’re streaming Disney content.”

Meanwhile, Amazon is shortening the path to purchase from ads on its Prime Video streaming service. The eCommerce giant’s ad business announced Tuesday (May 7) several new ad formats on the platform, including shoppable carousels as well as pause ads with add-to-cart functionality.

“Amazon Ads continues to reimagine the streaming TV experience with interactive ad formats that are seamlessly shoppable and help advertisers meaningfully connect with customers,” Alan Moss, vice president of global ad sales at Amazon Ads, said in a statement.

These moves come in the leadup to both Disney and Amazon’s upfronts, each of which is occurring this coming Tuesday (May 15).

Indeed, many consumers are open to shopping opportunities as they stream content, per data from PYMNTS Intelligence’s “How We Will Pay Report: How Connected Devices Enable Multitasking Among Digital-First Consumers.” The study, which drew from a survey of more than 4,600 U.S. consumers, found that more than three-quarters of consumers used connected devices in the previous month while engaged in leisure activities, and of these, 1 in 3 did so to shop.

Walmart’s partnership with Disney comes as the retailer looks to close the market share gap with Amazon. The PYMNTS Intelligence Whole Paycheck Report estimates Amazon and Walmart’s market shares in various categories based on years of earnings reports in conjunction with national data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis. The most recent edition, “New Consumer Spend Data Finds Amazon Way Ahead of Walmart,” found that Amazon held a 10% share of total consumer retail spending, and Walmart held a 7.3%.

Walmart and Amazon are not the only ones trying to capture streaming viewers’ shopping loyalty. In an interview with PYMNTS, Bryan Quinn, president and co-founder at Shopsense AI, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered retail media platform that recently partnered with Paramount, spoke to the growing competition for TV and movie viewers’ multi-tasking spending.

“There’s this fight going on in the living room for that consumer’s attention where they have the big screen on, but they also have their second screen device on,” Quinn said. “As we talk to broadcasters there’s a real desire to win back that attention of the living room and get back to where … they’re not competing with TikTok and with Google and with Amazon for the attention of that user.”