Meet 12 Walmart execs steering its $2.7 billion ad business as it races to catch up to Amazon
- Walmart is the second-largest retail advertising player, behind Amazon.
- The retailer is investing in talent, tech, and partnerships to grow its $2.7 billion ad business.
- Insider identified 12 execs in charge of growing Walmart's ad business.
Walmart has big ambitions to be an advertising juggernaut.
The largest retailer in the US has been beefing up its advertising business in recent years, and that work is starting to pay off. In 2022, Walmart's ad business, Walmart Connect, was $2.7 billion — up 30% year-over-year — making it the second-biggest e-commerce ad seller. It's striving to capture a market that Morgan Stanley predicts will be worth $130 billion by 2025.
Most of that market is currently owned by Amazon's $37.7 billion ad business. Walmart hopes to cut into that dominance by staffing up with advertising talent, building its tech stack with new formats including video, and forming partnerships with adtech companies and platforms like The Trade Desk that use its shopper data to sell programmatic and social ads.
Walmart is betting big on its physical scale to stand out from Amazon and other retail media sellers like Kroger and Walgreens. Walmart boasts nearly 5,000 stores in the US, and gathers a tremendous amount of first-party data from its shoppers.
Here are the 12 top Walmart execs running its advertising arm.
Gina Ballenger, senior director of Lightbox Creative
Ballenger leads Lightbox Creative, the arm of Walmart's ad business that makes creative and design-based campaigns for brands.
Her work makes innovative ads that improve Walmart's user experience. Her team recently helped develop homepage ad formats as part of a redesign of Walmart.com's homepage that has a social media-like scroll.
Ballenger has worked at Walmart for a couple of years and previously marketing and creative roles at Twitter and Wells Fargo.
Lara Barmish, head of consumables
Barmish leads sales for consumables — some of Walmart's biggest advertisers like skincare, cosmetics, and cleaning brands.
She also works across non-advertising departments like e-commerce and marketing to create omnichannel programs for brands. Part of her role is to help advise big brands on how much they should be spending on retail media as part of long-held shopper marketing deals.
Barmish joined Walmart in 2019. Prior to Walmart, she worked at Triad — the now-defunct ad agency that Walmart once hired to run its ad business. At Triad, she helped build relationships with agencies like WPP and Publicis and advertisers like Nestlé to buy retail ads.
Barmish has also worked in advertising roles at The Wall Street Journal and the WPP agency Mindshare.
Jeff Clark, VP and officer of product and omni commercialization
Clark is responsible for building ad products that can draw in advertisers and compete with other retailers. He is a longtime sales executive who joined Walmart in 2017, before the retail giant accelerated its ad selling business.
He's overseen the rollout of ad products like a measurement dashboard that shows advertisers sales from ads. He's also helped grow Walmart's programmatic advertising products, including a demand-side platform built with adtech firm The Trade Desk that advertisers use to buy digital ads targeted with shopping data.
Prior to joining Walmart, Clark led Google's publisher-facing ad sales team for video, and he has also worked at Yahoo and CBS Interactive.
Whitney Cooper, senior director of omnichannel transformation
Cooper joined Walmart in 2020 after working in e-commerce at Kellogg Co.
That background working inside a CPG giant plays a key role in how she thinks through new in-store advertising models for advertisers. She is responsible for testing new streams of advertising revenue within Walmart stores and developing new models for Walmart's largest advertisers. In addition to in-store ads, she also spearheads Walmart's out-of-home ad products.
Cooper's role spans across Walmart's advertising, merchandising, marketing, store operations, and e-commerce teams.
Her focus on in-store ads is key for Walmart since those ads still drive a significant amount of sales.
"Our mission is to create opportunities for our advertisers to engage — whether it's at the moment of truth on the shelf or it's when a customer is watching TV," she said on an episode of the podcast The CPG Guys last year.
Taly El-Zmetr, VP of operations and client services
El-Zmetr's teams build relationships with advertisers, including campaign and account managers that are advertisers' go-to contacts. She's responsible for growing Walmart's ad business by meeting advertisers' satisfaction through client services.
She's a longtime marketing exec who previously worked in advertising roles at Condé Nast and Pandora. In her previous roles, she's focused on developing new strategies and processes for working with advertisers. For example, she helped bring together client services into a global organization at Condé Nast. And at Pandora, she piloted the audio company's first forays into Australia and New Zealand.
Seth Dallaire, executive vice president and chief revenue officer
Dallaire is a longtime retail media exec who joined Walmart in 2021 to spearhead new revenue streams, including advertising, data, and membership programs.
He previously led advertising at Instacart and is credited with standing up the delivery service's ad business from scratch. He's also credited with accelerating Amazon's ad business, where he worked for seven years leading global ad sales.
At Walmart, he's staffed up the ad business with retail media talent, and rolled out new products that are aimed at putting Walmart's ad business on par with Amazon. For example, he tweaked Walmart's search algorithm to allow small and big brands to equally vie for high ranking through organic results and ads. Pricing for search ads also switched from a first-price auction to a second-price auction, which is how ads are sold on Amazon, eBay, and Instacart. And he led the development of a video ad format that appears in search results.
Ernesto Henríquez, senior director of client solutions and omni capabilities
Henríquez's job is to create ads and other retail programs for brands using Walmart's insights about shoppers. He pitches programs to advertisers that include Walmart's in-store and e-commerce insights aimed at helping brands find customers and sales.
He joined Walmart in 2019 and comes from an ad agency-heavy background. He worked in digital strategy, innovation, and business development roles at Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP before joining Walmart. He also worked at The Atlantic where he drew insights about the publishers' audience for advertisers.
Rich Lehrfeld, general manager and SVP of Walmart Connect
As general manager of Walmart Connect, Lehrfeld is the face of Walmart's ad business.
Lehrfeld joined Walmart in 2019 initially to lead Walmart's strategy as an advertiser. He switched to help lead Walmart's ad-selling division in 2020.
He has helped build out Walmart's ad business with self-serve tools to work with big and small advertisers. Lehrfeld has also helped land ad partnerships with TikTok, Snap, and Roku that track if someone bought a product at Walmart after seeing a social or streaming TV ad.
In a blog post last year, Lehrfeld laid out three parts of Walmart Connect's growth plan: New ad formats like video, self-serve tools, and measurement capabilities.
Before joining Walmart, Lehrfeld worked in marketing roles at American Express.
Ryan Mayward, SVP of sales
Mayward joined Walmart in October to lead ad sales. He told Insider that he joined Walmart to help brands connect their in-store ads with e-commerce as more people return to shopping in stores after the pandemic.
"What I've been hearing from brands is that retail media opportunities arising from e-commerce, pure-play retailers don't meet all their needs," he said.
He's a veteran digital advertising exec who previously led ad sales for Instacart and is a former Amazon ad exec. At Amazon and Instacart, he helped build relationships with advertising agencies, particularly while at Amazon with big holding companies like WPP and Publicis. He also helped Amazon pitch newer ad formats like programmatic ads and streaming TV.
Earlier in his career, Mayward worked in ad sales at NBCUniversal.
He is a board member of the Ad Council.
Kyle McWhirter, head of emerging sales
McWhirter leads sales for emerging advertisers. Walmart's core advertisers are big consumer packaged goods brands, but McWhirter focuses on medium-sized brands that are new to Walmart and use self-serve tools to buy ads.
He joined Walmart earlier this year from Instacart where he worked in a similar role with emerging brands. Before Instacart, McWhirter was the general manager of Ascential's arm called Spotlight that helps brands sell their products on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. He also was chief of staff of Amazon's advertising business, working with brands like Procter & Gamble.
Kara Rousseau, VP of marketing and Lightbox Creative
Rousseau joined Walmart in 2019 and played a key role in rebranding Walmart's in-housed ad business from Walmart Media Group to Walmart Connect. She develops the brand strategy, marketing, training and sales enablement for Walmart Connect. She works with the client solutions team to equip advertisers with insights about how people shop. Rousseau also leads Lightbox Creative, which makes creative for advertisers.
Walmart has formed partnerships with adtech companies like The Trade Desk, Pacvue, and Skai over the past few years, and Rosseau helps promote those partnerships in Walmart Connect's marketing.
Before Walmart, Rousseau worked in TV marketing at Disney for more than 13 years and has also worked at Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner.
Sylvia Yam, senior director of strategy and business development
Yam develops Walmart's long-term advertising strategy. She helped build a growth plan for Walmart Connect, where she vets new business partners as well as mergers and acquisitions. In 2021, Walmart acquired adtech firm Thunder to build out a self-serve ad platform. Walmart has also inked partnerships with retail adtech firms and agencies like Pacvue and Tinuiti that help advertisers buy and manage campaigns.
Yam is the steering committee lead for Walmart Connect's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The DE&I group's work includes working with diverse-owned advertisers and developing social responsibility ad campaigns.
Before joining Walmart, Yam worked in business development and strategy roles at companies including Framebridge, Shutterfly, and Yahoo.
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