HD

Vudu Makes Advertising More Relevant and Brings New Original Content to Viewers

Everybody wants free stuff. At Vudu, we’re working to make more content free for more people, with fewer barriers to viewing what they want. When it comes to video, most people will watch ads to be able to watch for free—but they rarely get ads that are meaningful to them.

Over the last decade, the digital landscape has been defined by an attempt to put the most relevant and useful ads in front of customers, to varying degrees of success.

And while brands find new ways to reach their customers online, their ability to target in a TV environment is challenging even today.

This week, we’re debuting a new technology to make targeting and reporting based on TV advertising smart, scalable, and retail-connected.

Vudu offers brands the opportunity to target users in a Premium TV environment based on their secure Walmart shopping data. Brands advertise to sell products, as well as to create desire and demand for their products. The best way to measure the success of these objectives is through interest, intent, and purchase. On Vudu, we’ve created the only advertising ecosystem that allows brands to target all of those things while closing the loop on advertising, which will make it possible for them to answer those critical questions: Did this ad work? Did it make a difference?

But at Walmart, we are always looking for ways to scale our impact to help more customers “Save Money. Live Better.” That’s why we’ve announced Vudu Audience Extension, our instant-scale, retail-connected audience extension media network.

We’re partnering with other OTT services to be able to identify, target, and measure sales performance with regard to our Walmart customers wherever they’re watching, not just on Vudu. This means that our customers get relevant ads wherever they are and that our advertisers will get the benefits of first-party, deterministic data, from the living room through to the purchase point—not just on Vudu, but on many other OTT services as well. It’s retail-connected advertising at the scale of Walmart. We’re rolling this out with select OTT partners, and we’re excited to announce those partners in the coming months

We also announced the first wave of our forthcoming slate of original content.

Our original content will help to further broaden Vudu’s reach, with incredible unscripted shows from Queen Latifah (Friends in Strange Places, a travel show with her celebrity friends, finding amazing experiences in unique places) and Randy Jackson (Turning Point with Randy Jackson, an exploration of the artistic journey of some of the most creative minds in America), alongside other scripted programming.

We’ve got a new show starring Evangeline Lilly, returning to television years after Lost, in Albedo, a genre-bending crime thriller, set 150 years in the future.

We’re also making a new kid-friendly movie, Adventure Force 5, from the visual effects team behind Game of Thrones.

And speaking of kids, Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues is coming back to screens as Blue’s Clues and You!, and we’re excited to be debuting this new incarnation on Vudu before its premiere on Nickelodeon in November.

And in case all that content, along with everything else coming out in the entertainment world, is too much to parse, we’ve got a new partnership with the authority on entertainment, Variety, a new show called First Look, coming this Fall, which will spotlight all things happening in entertainment and across the Walmart enterprise.

We look forward to sharing more about these shows in the coming weeks and months.

Vudu Audience Extension is where the power of the Walmart audience is really unleashed. This is premium, targetable, and attributable national TV at a Walmart-appropriate scale.

Not only can we now help our advertisers answer the question of whether their ad dollars were well spent—we can do it across more platforms while reaching more consumers. Best of all, advertisements are appropriately targeted so that potential consumers are seeing only the most relevant advertisements.

We believe that the future of TV looks a lot like the TV of the past: ad-supported, premium content that brings people together. But now it will be a lot better, for viewers and advertisers alike. Less frequent and more relevant ads wherever consumers watch, seamlessly integrated with the rest of their lives, create a better advertising experience for everyone.