Self Service Advertising – Walmart, Hulu – Chasing Small Businesses
If you’re thinking about exploring other ad platforms beyond Facebook and Google, you have more options now than ever. With their self-service advertising tools, new players like Hulu and Walmart are trying to lure small business owners to run effective advertising campaigns.
The Ad Market Has Become Super Competitive
Advertising is an age-old practice to build brand awareness and grow sales. Businesses are increasing their advertising budget to outgrow their competitors. So there is no surprise that the global advertising market is expected to reach US$ 769.9 Billion by 2024.
Digital advertising in the US is already bigger than print and TV. So it is understood that digital ads are going to pull the growth. Leading companies in the advertising domain, Google, Facebook, and Amazon accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total US digital ad spending last year.
However, the digital ad market is no longer going to be a playground for these three alone. Retail giant Walmart and Video on demand leader Hulu are all set to take the market share.
Walmart has been adding new ad technology to sell ad space on its in-store checkout and display screens. The company also bought an ad tech company with a view to creating an ad-buying platform to help businesses use Walmart data to run targeted digital ads across the web – not just Walmart’s website or app.
Janey Whiteside, chief customer officer at Walmart, said,
We built a pretty substantial media business and are investing in new capabilities and products that allow us to pivot from a traditional media business to a closed-loop omnichannel media company. The group has doubled its advertisers and revenue in the past year.
Video streaming giant Hulu also launched a self-service solution for small business owners.
Faye Trapani, Director, Self-Service Platform Sales, said in her post,
At Hulu, we want to help small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) build the best ads for streaming TV — ads that engage audiences in a streaming environment and meet the same high-quality standards as the content viewers are streaming.
Will These Players be a Good Fit for Your Business?
Being an entrepreneur or a business owner, you want the best value for every advertising dollar you spend.
Will self-service advertising platforms such as Hulu or Walmart help your business grow? The answer is a big resounding Yes.
Walmart has qualitative in-store and online shopper data, which will make the company stand out from other ad sellers. You can target customers more effectively with the wealth of shoppers’ data from Walmart.
Talking about Hulu’s self-service solution, it allows you to stream your ads on current TV hits, classics, and binge-worthy Hulu originals. With a minimum ad budget of $500 per campaign, you can easily run ads on this popular platform having millions of subscribers.
Hulu ad manager allows you to target people by gender, age, location, interests, and show genre. And you can narrow down your audience by state, city, ZIP code, or any combination of these.
When I asked Ramon Ray, small business expert and the founder of Smart Hustle media, about the effectiveness of these ad platforms, he said,
The arrival of Hulu and Walmart in the small business advertising space has provided small business owners with more options to target potential customers. This is certainly good news for small businesses. More big companies bringing self-service advertising solutions to small businesses will reduce businesses’ dependence on Google Ads or Facebook ads. In addition, businesses can reach out to a new set of audience with these ad platfroms.
He concluded,
As Hulu and Walmart have a sea of users’ data, small business owners can effectively target their ads to maximize success.
In closing,
Amid Facebook and Apple locking horns on privacy war, small businesses are looking for good options to advertise. And these self-service ad platforms can be those options.