When consumers think of Walmart as a brand, “innovative” may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But while speaking at a session at MMA Global’s POSSIBLE conference earlier this month, CMO William White aimed to dispel that myth, providing several examples of how the company is innovating across the board—despite its mammoth size. “You see it in all manner of our business, from supply chain to how we go to market,” he told the crowd. “Innovation is popping up in different parts of the company at all times.”

Take being the first retailer to offer drone delivery service, or rolling out a new open creator platform, called Walmart Creator, which, through influencer collaborations, incentivizes users to scale their businesses and drive sales. Each innovation, White explained, ties back to the brand’s relentless focus on how consumer expectations are evolving.

“Our business is fast,” he said. “We run from groceries to apparel to healthcare to financial services, et cetera. So we’re looking across variety of industries for, what are the things that are moving the needle? What are the things that are attracting customers? What are the things that are raising their expectations? And that’s done on a global scale.”

One way in which that has materialized is through its delivery options. Walmart currently offers drone delivery for 36 of its stores, and it also offers in-home delivery service for thousands more, which includes the added service of associates putting groceries away in the home. “That’s something that scaled pretty quickly,” White said. “And that was a small idea that we saw potential for and invested in it.”

Recently, Walmart has turned its attention to the overall customer experience. In order to keep up with customer expectations, senior executives across the company gather each Monday, White explained, to discuss and evaluate business results, from the in-store experience to the friendliness of associates to the speed of checkout to pick-up and delivery. “We gain a lot of insights into the things that we’re doing that drive positive and negative customer experience,” he said. “Everyone understands they have a role in the customer experience. And ultimately that’s a reflection of our brand, and really drives our way forward.”

The ability to evaluate customer experience is particular to the retail industry, according to White, who spent eight years as a global brand director at Coca-Cola. “The speed of retail is a lot faster than CPG… You see your scorecard every day, when you hit that early morning email with the previous day’s sales numbers. I think that the opportunity to make subtle, meaningful changes in the customer experience really moves the needle.”

Social commerce as a means to drive that customer experience is an area of focus for the retailer, White said. “As a marketing industry, we talk so much about different parts of the funnel… The cool thing about social commerce [is that] the whole funnel is right there… It’s brand building, it’s driving consideration and you can drive scale all in a very short, condensed path… It’s shortening that distance between inspiration and purchase.”

Case in point: Walmart recently jumped into the creator economy space with its new seller platform, Walmart Creator. “It’s an open platform where anyone can do it, and they’re incented and monetized based on what they sell. The great content is going to continue to rise to the top.” When asked whether creator economies are here to stay, White assured the crowd that the company believes it’s worth the investment. “Social commerce as a space is a large, meaty number with high growth,” he said. “I certainly don’t think it’s a shiny object or a flash in the pan. There are some creators that are scaling and driving greater power than others.”

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Social commerce is growing rapidly, according to a new Accenture report—about three times as fast as ecommerce. But while this explosive growth opens up new marketing and sales opportunities for retail brands, it also ushers in a new set of challenges relating to brand reputation, customer experience and security. A piece in Multichannel Merchant looks at key considerations for developing a social commerce strategy that focuses on maintaining and building customer trust.

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According to a study from ecommerce analytics tool provider Triple Whale, ad spend on TikTok in Q2 was up 53 percent from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram’s ad spend slowed in comparison. An article in Multichannel Merchant explores TikTok’s recent success with younger, engaged audiences, plus additional statistics surrounding DTC purchasing behavior.

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Fun fact: David’s Bridal, a company that has been selling dresses since the 1950s, now spends half its social media budget on TikTok. The strategy arose from the brand’s need to build engagement and close sales more than increase brand awareness. A piece in AdExchanger explores the company’s recent social push and how influencers factor heavily into its marketing strategy.

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At its annual advertiser summit this week, Pinterest announced plans to roll out new ecommerce tools for brands with the end goal of transforming the platform into a personalized shopping destination. Here’s what marketers need to know about the new features, according to coverage in AdExchanger, which include a tool that identifies trends, access to Pinterest’s first-party data, monetization of its Idea Pins, and more.

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New developments occurred in the social commerce space this week. On Oct. 6, Pinterest announced it has added several features to make shopping on the platform easier, including a new way to create shoppable videos, opportunities for creators to tag brands they want to collaborate with and the ability to promote a brand’s values, such as adding labels like “women-owned” or “eco-friendly business,” according to reporting from AdExchanger.

For shoppable video, merchants can pull in many products from their catalog feed automatically through a tool called Slideshow for Collections. Creators can tag a brand or products and promote an ad through an Idea Ads with Paid Partnership feature. And sellers can become Verified Merchants to showcase their affiliations.

The differentiator Pinterest is going for relates to its focus on discovery and capturing intent as opposed to facilitating transactions. It hopes to a play a role in “bridging upper-funnel discovery and bottom-of-the-funnel purchases.” By emphasizing shopping rather than merely buying, the platform aims to create more of an experience. For more details on Pinterest’s new features, read on in AdExchanger.

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Not surprisingly, social media platforms are creating new ways to shop online, and the latest is TikTok, which has entered the game with a partnership with Shopify. Sellers on the platform will gain access to the social network’s 800 million global users.

Earlier this year, Shopify gained access to Walmart’s Marketplace, and prior to that, Facebook Shops gave its sellers first dibs on the service at launch. In this latest move, Shopify’s one million merchants are able to set up, manage and monitor campaigns within TikTok, according to Multichannel Merchant.

TikTok for Business was created in June as a hub for marketers seeking to capitalize on the platform’s young, highly-engaged audience. The new TikTok channel will let merchants deploy automatically-generated, in-feed shoppable video ads within Shopify. Marketers are able to target audiences by gender, age, user behavior and video category. They can also track campaign performance.

The benefit for Shopify merchants? Even if you don’t have a strong TikTok following you are able to connect with new audiences that are engaged on the social platform. For more detail on the collaboration, read more in Multichannel Merchant.

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