Walmart is making mobile advertising a higher priority. That much became clear Tuesday when the consumer retail giant announced its acquisition of mobile and social ad firm OneRiot.
According to published reports, OneRiot originally launched as a real-time search engine only to change course and, instead, dedicate its technology to mobile and social advertising. Now, OneRiot’s resources and technology will become an integral part of WalmartLabs’ mobile and social shopping aspirations.
Posting in the @WalmartLabs Blog, SVP of Walmart’s Global e-Commerce division Anand Rajaraman writes:
A few weeks ago, a small team from @WalmartLabs visited the offices of OneRiot in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. OneRiot has developed some pretty nifty technology that analyzes social media signals from popular networks like Twitter and Facebook to deliver ads that are relevant to consumers’ interests. As our teams debated the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies, it became clear to us that we could find no better colleagues than the guys at OneRiot.
Rajaraman adds that Walmart continues to “work with the intensity of a technology startup,” as the company began acquisition talks within 30 days of the first meeting with OneRiot.
“As I have written before,” Rajaraman concludes, “here at @WalmartLabs we’re doing some amazingly interesting and impactful work at the intersection of social, mobile, and retail. The technology at the core of what we do is the Social Genome, which enables us to connect millions of consumers with the best products based on their interests at any given moment. The OneRiot technology will enrich the Social Genome, and the OneRiot team adds to the already deep expertise we have around social data analysis.”
