Video Review: How to Use Purchase and Intent Data

In the video, “Leveraging Purchase and Intent Data: A Fireside Chat With Stefanie Jay,” two experts in the marketing space discuss how Walmart Media Group uses purchase intent data and purchase history data to connect marketing activities to buyer journeys.

Stefanie Jay, joined Walmart eCommerce as the vice president and head of corporate development and is now the VP and GM of Walmart Media Group. She spoke with Founder and CEO of LUMA Partners Terence Kawaja at LUMA’s Digital Marketing Summit in 2018.

Jay, who considers Walmart Media Group to be the biggest start-up within the biggest company, set out to “take brands closer to the customer.”

The mission of the advertising platform is to deliver the right content, the right advertising experiences, and the right engagement to customers across the buying process; to “be in the right time and place” in a way that enhances the buyer’s journey, Jay said.

Using Purchase Intent Data

According to Jay, the Walmart Media Group ad platform has a built-in competitive edge: The vast amounts of purchase and intent data at the Walmart store level, or at the brick-and-mortar level.

She said the platform and the database that powers it uses all of the purchase and intent data from both online and in-store transactions, and the purchase data from 140M weekly in-store transactions.

These massive first-party purchase and intent data sets Walmart Media Group uses allows them to target advertisements at buyers with as much granularity as they care to exercise.

Build, Partner, Buy

Kawaja asked how marketing organizations can partner with Walmart Media Group to help the platform succeed, and to help their own endeavors succeed.

Jay said, “We have a core that we have built ourselves and continue to build and enhance on. As things are very close to the data piece of it, how we think of our customer data is probably where we’re going to build more, and keep that pretty close to home.”

Building such a platform from scratch is almost absurdly ambitious. As such, Walmart Media Group partners with other marketing organizations who can enable the platform’s growth.

Acquiring Jet.com was a boon for both the structure, culture, and innovation of the eCommerce team. Additionally, it was advantageous in that Jet.com CEO Marc Lore was appointed CEO of the Walmart eCommerce organization.

Though neither speaker touched on the purchase and intent data sets that were certainly acquired and merged in the acquisition of Jet.com, it’s a safe assumption that increasing the diversity of their digital-channel data sources didn’t hurt the growth or targeting capabilities of the ad platform.

Check out the 20-minute video below to hear more about Stefanie Jay’s purchase and intent data strategy for Walmart Media Group.