Walmart’s $1.4 billion Vibe.co deal is a direct shot at Amazon’s booming ad business

Walmart’s biggest acquisition in two years is a signal from CEO John Furner that he is serious about his ambitions to challenge Amazon.com’s massive lead in the advertising space.

The retailer said this week it will pay $1.4 billion to buy a French advertising-technology firm, Vibe.co. That company enables advertising through televisions connected to the internet and streaming content and, more crucially, focuses on enabling small and medium-size advertisers that might not have access to the large ad-buying agencies, and are thus an underserved market. 

“We want to be where our customers are spending their time,” Ryan Mayward, senior vice president and general manager of Walmart Connect US, told Bloomberg in an interview.

This latest deal, the first sizable one since Furner became CEO last winter after several years heading Walmart’s U.S. business, builds on Walmart’s acquisition in 2024 of connected-TV maker Vizio. 

That deal was not about selling television sets as much as it was to beef up its Walmart Connect media and digital-advertising business, which serves ads on Walmart’s website, app, in-store screens, and elsewhere online, targeted using Walmart’s customer data. While still a small source of revenue, non-retail businesses like advertising and membership are the fastest-growing and most profitable incremental businesses for the Arkansas-based retailer.

It’s a business that Walmart is following its biggest rivel, Amazon, into. (In 2025, Amazon surpassed Walmart in revenue and is now the No.1 company in the Fortune 500.) By some estimates, Walmart’s ad business generated $6.4 billion in revenue, or 1% of its total revenue; that’s about a tenth of what Amazon’s did. Still, it is a highly profitable business compared to the tiny margins in its mammoth retail business. And Walmart has grown its digital prowess in recent years: The 64-year-old megastore has narrowed the gap in online sales with the digital-native Amazon significantly, even as it remains a distant No. 2 in U.S. e-commerce sales.

Furner, who was the right-hand man of his predecessor Doug McMillon in turning Walmart into a more dominant e-commerce player and branching out beyond retail in search of new revenues, signaled with his first appointments in January that he intended to continue on that path. 

Those included promoting David Guggina, its U.S. e-commerce chief executive last winter to become CEO of Walmart’s $500-billion U.S. division, despite Guggina having no experience running stores and or in merchandising. Furner also hired Seth Dallaire, a veteran of Instacart and Amazon, as his chief growth officer for Walmart U.S., charging him with developing tech-heavy lines of business, including advertising, media, and online marketplace ventures. 

And in 2025, Walmart moved its shares from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq—another clear signal that it wants to be seen as a tech-focused company.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com