“It's not about targeting people who are interested in home renovation. It's about targeting people who are currently buying a sink.”
Vibe.co is rolling out a new offering today that allows advertisers to target streaming TV viewers using Walmart Audiences, the company's extensive shopping and purchase-intent data set.
We sat down with Vibe.co CEO Arthur Querou to talk about what the announcement means for advertisers, how AI makes the new targeting capabilities accessible to smaller brands and why the combination of retail data and performance advertising could change the way brands use CTV.
ALAN WOLK (AW): Why is this announcement so significant?
ARTHUR QUEROU (AQ): I think this is one of the most important things happening in TV right now, especially CTV. Bringing this level of targeting to television is a major step in transforming it into a performance channel.
We cover a very large spectrum of product categories, from skincare and serums to automotive parts and pretty much anything you can think of. We're talking about thousands of audiences because Walmart has so many different products.
And now these audiences are readily available to Vibe.co advertisers. They can target them directly on TV, with all the features that made Vibe popular, like our integrations with CRMs, CDPs and measurement platforms, along with our ROI optimization models.
AW: For those unfamiliar with Vibe, what's the idea behind the platform?
AQ: Vibe is a self-serve platform for advertising on connected TV. Our big breakthrough was democratizing TV advertising for smaller brands, mid-market brands and performance marketers.
TV has always been associated with the top of the funnel, and we've been transforming it into a performance channel for DTC and e-commerce brands. That's why Walmart acquired us this summer.
AW: How will this new integration impact the way your clients interact with the platform?
AQ: The platform remains super simple to use. You select your advertiser, your campaign type and your campaign goal.
Before, we already had in-market audiences, but they were much more limited. Our philosophy has always been to create our own audiences because performance advertisers require a lot of precision.
Now you have all these Walmart audiences.
Let's say we're creating a campaign for Kiehl's, and we want to sell a lip-plumping serum. There are thousands of Walmart audiences, which can be a lot to navigate. So we use AI to help find the best audiences for your product.
You click Smart Select, and it goes through those thousands of audiences to find the ones we believe will deliver the best performance.
For our serum, it might identify lip plumpers, face serums, hair serums, dietary supplements and so on. You can target recent buyers or people who are in-market for those products.
And if you want to select audiences manually, you can do that too.
The precision is really the important part. It's not about targeting people who are interested in home renovation. It's about targeting people who are currently buying a sink. That's how precise we can get.
AW: And once they've picked those audiences, what happens next?
AQ: You select the suppliers you want to run on, whether that's Vizio, Hulu or other channels. You upload your creative, just as before.
But now when we execute that buy, we're targeting those exact audiences. If you're selling lip plumpers, you're reaching people who are actively buying lip plumpers at Walmart, and you're reaching them in their living rooms.
We're also starting to see some very interesting use cases where advertisers personalize their creative based on the audience they're targeting.
AW: Tell me more about how AI integrations can make managing all those different campaigns a lot easier.
AQ: Performance marketers love to experiment. They want to test different audiences, different creatives and different products to see what works best.
But that can make campaigns very complicated to set up, even on platforms like Facebook or Google.
All of these capabilities are available through our MCP, CLI and API. That means you can use something like Claude to set up your Vibe campaigns.
Let's say you're an e-commerce company with 100 different products. You can have Claude create a strategy for each product, with different audiences and creatives, all using Walmart Audiences.
Being able to do all that with AI and agents opens up some very exciting possibilities.
AW: How are you able to find these Walmart shoppers on CTV?
AQ: One of the things we've built at Vibe is our own identity solution, which we use for targeting and measuring performance.
The industry standard has traditionally relied on IP addresses, but IP addresses are unreliable. They rotate a lot, and that creates false positives.
So we moved away from IP addresses a while ago. We now rely on email identifiers through an identity solution we've built ourselves.
And Walmart is one of the largest retailers in the world, with an amazing amount of email data from shoppers.
So Walmart creates the bridge between commerce and digital identity, and Vibe creates the bridge between digital identity and TV.
The two fit together really well.
AW: You mentioned personalizing the creative for different audiences. How does that work?
AQ: We have Vibe Studio, which is our AI-enabled ad generator, and we've also partnered with companies like Higgsfield.
So let's go back to that example of an advertiser with 100 SKUs.
You could use Claude to say, here are my 100 SKUs. Create a strategy for every SKU based on the Walmart audiences available on Vibe, then use Higgsfield to generate a creative for each product and set everything up in Vibe.
All of a sudden, you have 100 different products being advertised on TV, each with the right creative and highly targeted audiences.
AW: What about measurement? How do advertisers know what's working?
AQ: Vibe is all about experimenting, and to experiment, you need to measure.
One of our product principles is that anything that's targetable should be measurable.
So you can see performance by audience, by channel, by creative, by time of day, by app, whatever you're targeting. Then you can make adjustments manually, with our agent or using Claude or ChatGPT.
But I always tell advertisers not to rely solely on an ad platform's dashboard—and I'm an ad platform guy.
An ad platform doesn't have a holistic view of your entire acquisition stack. It doesn't know everything that contributed to a conversion.
That's why you need good attribution methodologies and independent third-party measurement.
We're integrated with measurement partners, and if you're running your own media mix modeling, we can send log files directly to your servers.
You can use geo-lift studies, MMM or other methodologies. We also have control groups built into the platform.
We're focused on incremental ROI, not just ROI.
AW: One last thing. How are you handling the supply side?
AQ: One thing people don't always realize is that we work almost exclusively through direct integrations with publishers. That gives us premium, direct access to supply and helps us avoid the fraud issues that can come from working through middlemen.
We're here to help advertisers understand how performance TV works. But if they don't want to talk to anyone, they can just register on Vibe.co and go live.
