Surprising, surprise: Walmart is good at running an advertising business.

The big blue retail behemoth revealed for the first time in an earnings report that it pulled in $2.1 billion in advertising revenue last year, largely on the strength of its retail media network, Walmart Connect.

Sure, it’s less than 1% of the company’s Q4 quarterly revenue ($152.9 billion, if you’re curious) and yet…it’s still $2.1 billion, a testament to Walmart’s scale and interest from advertisers, hungry for data into purchasing habits.

Why is retail data so important? From baby food to lonely, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, few things are as intimate and revealing as our shopping carts. They provide data points retailers can sell to advertisers to understand their audiences, hoping to lure shoppers either online or before their next trip to Walmart.

It’s the mechanisms and signals of digital advertising but *stoned hippie voice* in the real world, man.

Nine of the top 10 largest retailers in the US have started their own media networks over the past couple of years, including Target, Kroger, Lowe’s, Walgreens, and Albertsons.

Walmart’s seems to be doing pretty well, leveraging its massive scale to attract advertising dollars. Some numbers from the retailer:

• Globally, approximately 230 million customers visit Walmart-owned properties every week (!), either in-store or online.
• Nearly 150 million of those customers are in the US.
• 90% of US households shop at Walmart every year.
• Walmart InHome, the company’s grocery-delivery business, plans to expand its availability from 6 million to 30 million homes in the US by the end of 2022.

According to Semrush, Walmart.com is the ninth most-visited website in the US (behind Pornhub). Amazon is in fourth place, FWIW.

“I know how America shops more than anybody,” said Jeff Clark, officer and VP of Walmart Connect. “We’re not just a grocery store, we’re not just a pharmacy, we’re not just an auto-care center; we’re all those things.”

Which means it has lots of data points.

Here’s what he’s pitching: Walmart sells sponsored search inventory and display advertisements on its owned media (like its website). Last fall, Walmart rolled out a demand-side platform built with The Trade Desk that lets advertisers reach Walmart customers across the internet, not just on Walmart’s own properties.

Click here to read more about the retailer's ad business.—RB

Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus definitely graced the screen during the Super Bowl…but what brand were they talking about? And Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd earned some laughs while sharing a bag of…which crunchy snack?

Therein lies a potential problem with the star-studded Super Bowl ads: Are these celebrity shills getting more attention than the brands they’re promoting?

It’s a hard question to answer. But according to data from measurement and analytics company EDO, many of this year’s Super Bowl ads led people to search for the featured celebs at higher rates than the brands themselves.

Dolly Parton climbs in search…T-Mobile less so

Parton and Cyrus are a prime example of this scenario. Parton’s name generated an additional 53.6 million searches above the average search volume in the moments after her first Super Bowl ad aired, making her the highest-ranked celebrity on EDO’s search index list, CEO Kevin Krim told Marketing Brew.

• EDO calculates these spikes primarily by analyzing internet searches, the vast majority of which are from Google. The duration of the spike on a normal night of TV is usually only a few minutes, he said, but it takes closer to 15 minutes for searches to return to a normal volume during a big event like the Super Bowl.
• Cyrus racked up an additional 179,000 searches after her first ad ran.
• By comparison, T-Mobile—that’s the brand they were touting, by the way—generated an additional 31,000 searches. T-Mobile actually ran two ads with Parton and Cyrus, and saw about 135,000 searches after the second, but still fewer than both Parton and Cyrus, respectively.

So what happened? Krim theorized T-Mobile might’ve gotten fewer searches because it wasn’t using the airtime to debut a new, tangible product. Instead, it had Parton and Cyrus evangelize about its 5G service, a concept Americans have heard about for years, but one that many likely can’t describe.

Click here to see other brands that saw fewer searches than the famous faces in their ads (and which advertisers managed to outshine celebs).—AM

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew’s readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

David Stagg is president of Mainline, an esports tournament software company. “Our company works directly with gaming-related clubs and organizations on college campuses to run esports tournaments for that specific school,” he told Marketing Brew. “Think of it like pickup basketball. We know a lot of people want to play basketball, but it’s so much easier to get good games going when someone organizes a date, time, and location. That’s what we do. We facilitate that date and time, provide prizing, handle the officiating, collect scores, things of that nature.”

Favorite project you’ve worked on? No question, the most fulfilling project I’ve been a part of also happens to be our largest: creating and operating the Collegiate Esports Hub. The Hub is a network of esports tournaments we organize and operate for colleges and universities across the US and Canada. They’re specifically designed to grow the gaming communities within the school itself, and, with every college being its own unique fingerprint, it unearths a number of ridiculously fun problem-solving opportunities. It’s a dream job: video games, colleges, technology, product design...Younger me is over the moon.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I grew up in the heyday of Budweiser’s advertising campaigns, a title belt Anheuser-Busch refuses to give up easily. The “BUD—WEIS—ER” frogs. “I love you, man!” The “Real Men of Genius” radio commercials. But my favorite has always been the “Whassup!” campaign that debuted in 1999 during Monday Night Football. It’s easy to forget how fantastic the actual commercial was because you got too used to your dad yelling it at you every time he saw you. For 1995, it was so prescient. It’s internet-humor well before irreverent, absurdist humor was omnipresent. That commercial could be viral on TikTok today.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I’m bullish on the influencer-based economy with specific regard to the esports industry. We have seen it increase participation numbers and “generate conversation.” With new NIL opportunities in the collegiate ecosystem, it’s going to become more and more important for us to leverage. On the contrary, I’d be perfectly fine if I never had to hear “NFT” again.

If you want to learn the skills of modern business with a group of incredible professionals just like you, now’s the time. Apply for MB/A before March 14 and you may be admitted to the course for free!

See contest rules here.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Trendy: Twitter released its latest annual Twitter Trends Report digging into trends on the platform. Among some of the findings: there’s been a big uptick in conversations related to sustainability.

Keep it simple: In many ways, static ads outperformed video ads on Pinterest in this experiment comparing the performance of both ad formats. However, the report said that advertisers “cannot ignore that good-looking conversion rate on the video ads side”—nearly 2% as opposed to about 0.9% for static ads.

Head start: New to SEO? This handy guide breaks down what’s important to focus on first.

Flex your (digital) muscles. 97% of executives said the pandemic sped up their digital commerce transformation—so if you don’t already have a plan for going digital, you’ll have to sprint to keep up. Get started with this CMO’s guide from inriver.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• How BookTok changed this brand’s influencer marketing strategy
• Roundup: Brands that recently chose new agencies
• Three strikes and you’re out of a brand deal?

South by Southwest, which kicks off in Austin, Texas, on Friday, has been a media, tech, and entertainment staple for decades, drawing travelers from across the country. In what year was the conference first held?

1. 1999
2. 1987
3. 1974
4. 2008

Keep scrolling for the answer.