Walmart is bringing ads to an aisle near you as retailers chase new money-makers | Hacker News Reader

Walmart is bringing ads to an aisle near you as retailers chase new money-makers

cnbc.com

10 pointshzj579010 comments

Is it not already bad enough that it's actually mentally exhausting walking through a Wal-Mart already with all the visual stimulus competing for your attention? If we add sound and even more moving visuals to that it's going to be critical overload.

I feel like there's going to be a lot more vandalizing happening. I have already seen people fill the speaker meshes at the gas stations with expanding spray foam to shut up the advertisements and screens destroyed by impact or slashing while leaving the pump readout untouched. I myself get very tempted to do the same thing and cost the company money until they learn. If retailers start doing this they're going to be losing so much money replacing and repairing things that inventory shrinkage will look like somebody dropped their change in comparison.

Classic. After the initial "convenience" bait, any screen will display unskippable ads. Waiting for car dashboards, it's a matter of time.

In my local Walmart, these screens would get drawn all over pretty quickly after they're put up. I'm sure there are nice Walmart where this will work, but I'll see an ad with male genitals drawn over it.

Your local Walmart has a rightly opinionated clientele.

3rd party ads at checkout and sample items at demo stations? Are these new things specifically for Wal-Mart or US market in general? I'm genuinely interested because in Europe they seem to be a standard for many years already.

That's why I shop at the local open air market, paying cash. Sack of potatoes in exchange for banknote, hand to hand, then the transaction vanishes into non-existence, every time I feel like a secret agent. In turn on every visit to retailer I see one human checkout, people walking like zombies checking something in the retailer's app, people at self-checkout waiting for staff, most of the assortment being sugar/fat/salt processed poisons, visual and audio ads creeping from everywhere. Ridiculously absurd spectacle.

From the Article:

"One of Walmart’s latest offerings at its SuperCenters isn’t a hot new toy, snack flavor or sundress. It’s advertising.

Shoppers will soon see more third-party ads on screens in Walmart self-checkout lanes and TV aisles; hear spots over the store’s radio; and be able to sample items at demo stations.

Walmart’s push into advertising resembles similar moves by retailers like Kroger, which struck a deal to bring digital smart screens to cooler aisles in hundreds of its stores, and Target, which began testing in-store demos and giveaways, including a recent “Barbie” branded event with Mattel that took place at about 200 stores.

For Walmart, selling ad space to its wealth of existing partners is another way to capitalize on the company’s huge reach and to expand into higher-margin businesses. The discounter has nearly 4,700 stores across the U.S., with roughly 90% of Americans living within 10 miles of a Walmart store.

In the U.S., about 139 million customers visit Walmart stores and its website or app each week.

“When you think about our store, our store footprint and the the percentage of Americans that we reach through our stores, we can deliver Super Bowl-sized audiences every week,” said Ryan Mayward, senior vice president of retail media sales for Walmart Connect, the retailer’s advertising business.

The company plans to ramp up in-store ads using its approximately 170,000 digital screens across its locations as well as 30-second radio spots that will be available to suppliers later this year and can target a specific store or region.

And it’s hoping at least one of the new advertising initiatives will be easy to digest: Free samples in stores on the weekends.

Walmart plans to sell the sampling stations to advertisers and bundle them with other ad formats that can run at the same time to make for a fuller campaign. QR codes at the demo tables will pull up online shopping options, meal ideas or seasonal information.

It tried out the new in-house approach of selling sampling stations in Dallas-Fort Worth and plans to offer the option in over 1,000 stores across the country by end of January."

Have you filled up your car at BP lately?

Oh look, another ChatGPT article summarizer.

I don't get it. Hasn't this already been a thing in supermarkets for years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com