The partnership aims to elevate influencer insights from just follower counts or demographics to essentially answering the question of “what do an influencer’s followers buy?” By pairing Walmart Connect’s first-party, purchase-based insights with Meta’s insights, Creo can use its Influencer Discovery Agent to identify creators on Instagram whose followers offer better conversion potential, In hopes of using the data to pick creators that it said can deliver performance, not just popularity.

As Joanna O’Connell, Omnicom Media’s North American chief intelligence officer, noted, “Of people that said that they purchased because of an influencer, 42% said it was spontaneous,” which changes all historical notions of the purchase funnel. “Influencers are. like a new form of recommender, whether it’s a trustworthy expert or a friend. Especially with niche rising ones, where it feels like you’re a part of their community or you’re invested in their journey. So we’ve already proven that there’s value in them as a social engine. This just adds a new dynamic to me on why.”

It’s not the first time Omnicom Media has tapped Walmart purchase data to connect it to social and influencer platforms — it connected to TikTok last summer in an announcement at Cannes Lions. Expanding to Meta only deepens the pool of influencers and their followers it can bring its brands to. 

“It’s really making influencer selection much more data driven, much more addressable,” said Megan Pagliuca, chief product officer at Omnicom Media North America. 

Walmart, of course, doesn’t mind being tied to more of the major platforms’ influencers who are able to move the sales needle. “Expanding our strategic partnership with Omnicom to include Meta is proof of how retail media’s audience targeting capabilities can connect real customers to creator audiences, helping brands identify and activate the right influencer partnerships with more precision,” said Ryan Mayward, svp of retail media sales with Walmart Connect. 

For Kevin Blazaitis, who helms Omnicom Media’s Creo influencer agency, it’s about delivering on three ‘R’s: reach, resonance and reaction. “We can now quantify the reach, we can understand the resonance of a creator’s content, and now we can look at what reactions we can expect from that audience,” said Blazaitis, who noted this works especially well for CPG advertisers as well as non-endemic categories. “Being able to quantify that is great.”

“Creators are a huge area of focus for Meta and so we’re pleased to support the development of Omnicom’s newest tool, which builds on the advanced capabilities of Meta’s Creator Marketplace,” said Simon Whitcombe, vp and head of Meta’s global business group for North America. “It’s a testament to the innovation that’s possible when you work across the agency, brand, and platform ecosystem, and I look forward to seeing the new opportunities it creates for creators and brands.”

Omnicom client Bimbo Bakeries U.S. is already using it, given that the discovery agent has been live since the summer. “The integration of Walmart Connect’s audience data and Meta’s creator discovery within Creo’s discovery agent is helping to redefine how we are thinking about creator partnerships across the funnel,” said Catherine Berger, vp of transformation and marketing services at Bimbo Bakeries. “Influencers are now integral to our business growth, directly inspiring purchase decisions and deepening customer loyalty.  By selecting creators based on Walmart purchase history, we’re able to leverage creator strategies that turn social engagement into measurable results.”

Dru Sil, who’s executive director of product strategy for Omnicom’s Omni platform, emphasized that the data being generated is a direct match of purchase data, not some hypothetical audience. “There’s a higher level of precision in this type of push, which is quite useful for the insights we want to get out of it,” said Sil, who noted that all these inputs get fed into Omnicom’s Omni operating platform so the insights become cumulative with each partnership the holdco forms.

“We have a curated, data-driven starting point that’s based on this intersection between Walmart and Meta,” said Sil. “And then we build on top of that with all the other data, signals that we have in our influencer spine and database … All of these things are fair game in our system for then further refining down the list of creators that we want to then take live in a campaign.”