As an industry as a whole, marketers and agencies are inching closer to unraveling the mysteries of what advertising drives consumers to buy products and services, and retail media networks appear to have the best wisdom to offer. Digiday has learned that Walmart Data Ventures is rolling out the Scintilla Media Data Feed. This is a new API that enables advertisers and their agencies to securely share Walmart’s first-party operational and retail data with agencies and technology partners through scalable API access.
As a broader data offering, Scintilla has been live since 2021, with more commerce-side data now available to agencies and technology partners, and more direct access, all effective this week.
The API provides what it calls “non-media, omnichannel signals” that help advertisers understand activity across Walmart’s online and in-store commerce, independent of ad activation. This insight includes near real-time updates on inventory and availability, store-level trends, and regional performance without involving suppliers.
Linda Lomelino, Walmart’s vice president of products, data ventures and advertising, said the service isn’t fully self-service, but it’s getting there.
“That’s what’s really cool: You can plan, optimize, and measure in a completely different way,” Lomelino says. “Suppliers/advertisers will allow their partners to join this ecosystem, but instead of manually passing data to an agency or technology partner, they will be able to actually start streaming the data.”
Lomelino believes the sheer volume of the expanded Scintilla data feed should create demand. “This is about 500 retail metrics and insights that these technology partners and agencies didn’t have access to, and it goes way beyond what I would call traditional media measurement insights. This is omnichannel because it’s total retail performance.”
Thanks to a series of partnerships between Walmart and Omnicom over the past two years, Omnicom is one of the first distributor holding companies to have been fortunate enough to have access to Walmart’s data. Still, Mike Feldman, senior vice president of commerce at Flywheel, Omnicom’s commerce arm, said the value of in-store data and insights is giving the feed more life.
“This is a very powerful tool to see what our total marketing is doing to drive the entire Walmart ecosystem, not just what’s driven by advertising. This is a much stronger story than just the data driven by advertising,” said Feldman, who also went out of his way to praise the depth of Amazon’s data (Omnicom is Amazon’s primary agency partner). “Think about the in-store data that Walmart has. Think about the different avenues and consumers.”
In Feldman’s view, Wal-Mart’s ubiquity among U.S. shoppers gives Scintilla even more leverage. “The American consumer is Walmart, so we can now understand the entire purchasing behavior of these people across every touchpoint,” he explained, citing regional insights, online and in-store penetration, and other statistics that can impact how we advertise.
Lomelino said that Vizio data isn’t currently part of what Scintilla’s API offers, but he didn’t rule out it could be included at some point in the future.
Lomelino shared an example of a CPG client that used Scintilla’s extension API and was losing customers to competitors in a specific area (he declined to specify advertisers or geographies).
In a blog post announcing the new initiative, Lomelino explained the success rate for his clients. “The brand saw a 2.97% increase in sales across target markets and reached 2.1 million households with 18.62x higher impression delivery across target markets. [and a] The return rate for repeat buyers is 72% and the acquisition rate for new buyers is 31%. ”
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