Omnicom Partners With Walmart, Instacart, First Of Many eCommerce Deals at Cannes Lions 

Omnicom plans to announce several e-commerce-related partnerships with major retail players during the Cannes Lions festival. Recently, the agency holding company struck its first strategic agency partnership with Walmart Connect.

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Cross-screen Planning it is!

Walmart Connect, a closed-loop omnichannel media business offers advertisers an opportunity to reach Walmart shoppers on Walmart’s site and app, across its physical locations, and on the web. The first strategic agreement lets all Omnicom agencies execute cross-screen planning against Walmart audiences in the Omni marketing orchestration platform. Planners can identify the domains, apps, and screens with the most effective reach and cost for Walmart audiences. Using the Omni ID, they can push advertisers’ first-party data to the Walmart DSP where it combines with Walmart audiences.

The retail giant is building a platform to leverage the scale of Walmart’s first-party data and strong customer relationships to help marketers deliver strong ROI in an increasingly fragmented environment. Walmart Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire said.

“Our partnership with Omnicom illustrates Walmart Connect’s focus on driving growth, improving product capabilities, and educating the industry on the role retail media platforms have in delivering measurable solutions that connect clients with omnichannel shoppers.”

The access to the WalmartDSP and within Omni will allow optimizing supply paths as well as inventory planning that will increase the investment efficiency for OMG clients. As quoted by Digiday, Megan Pagliuca, Chief Activation Officer, Omnicom Media Group said, 

“We can take client first-party data, push it via the Omni ID into the Walmart DSP, then plan the right inventory paths to execute against. Having Walmart be a part of our planning capabilities gives a significant benefit to our CPG advertisers. And that is particularly powerful for the non-endemics because we can both use Walmart data, and then optimize towards other outcomes rather than in-store measurement.”

Another potential benefit of the deal is the ability to connect Walmart’s in-store TV network in its 4,700 stores to Omnicom’s programmatic OOH practice. Dallaire told Digiday, 

“Omnicom has been leading the way in terms of that programmatic out-of-home space. So I see that as being a really interesting and fun area for us to collaborate.”

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Data, the oil to the e-Commerce vehicle 

Omnicom making its second of a series of deals, at this week’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The agency holding company announced a strategic partnership with e-commerce player Instacart which involves sharing data and new measurement capabilities that can more directly tie sales to TV advertising.

Instacart is building a roadmap to working within the clean room infrastructure of Omni –  Omnicom’s open operating system which orchestrates better outcomes for clients across the entire consumer purchasing journey. The Omni clean room allows access to previously built partnerships with NBCU & Disney for planning and measurement.

Instacart has the full insight of the sales data – right from customers searching through checkout – across different touchpoints. Instacart provides CPG brands with aggregated, anonymized, and retailer-agnostic data insights across the entire Instacart app that allows advertisers to better understand their customers’ online buying habits.

The partnership advances OMG’s goal of providing brand executives with a holistic view of media investments, allowing them to prove the effectiveness and value of advertising. Ryan Mayward, Vice President of Ad Sales at Instacart explained, 

“For example, in the future, a home cleaning supply brand can better understand how its ads on Hulu drove purchase of its products on Instacart. 

We can also dive deep on basket analysis and content consumption trends with Omnicom to help that brand understand which products resonate most with audiences. Our vision is to equip CPG brands with the data and shopping insights they need to better understand their business and identify growth opportunities.”

Summing up the collaboration on insights and measurement, Officer Megan Pagliuca said,

“Omnicom and Instacart can help brands transform top-of-funnel, brand-building marketing channels to outcomes-based media.”

On the series of e-Commerce moves, Omnicom eCommerce CEO Frank Kochenash concluded that each collaboration offers unique capabilities to connected commerce which will benefit the client investment across all mediums.