The week's TikTok drama revealed a lot about Walmart's e-commerce and advertising ambitions.
Hi and welcome to the Advertising Insider, weekly edition, where we break down the big stories in media and advertising.
Remember you can sign up to get this daily newsletter here.
What Walmart wants
Since Donald Trump demanded that TikTok be sold to a US company, a growing list of companies including Microsoft, Oracle, and Netflix have been named as interested in owning the wildly popular social media app.
Walmart may never convince shoppers it's cool, despite having an especially active account on the app, Walmart saw TikTok's ecommerce toehold as a way to grow its online shopping business. Here's Lauren Johnson's breakdown of what a TikTok deal tells us about Walmart and its effort to compete with Amazon.
Walmart is also trying to take on Amazon's Prime service with a copycat version that costs less and includes free delivery.
But Amazon still gets as much as 90% of ad budgets, while Walmart has yet to work out some of its kinks and catch up to Amazon's sophistication.
The streaming wars are in full swing, and with four new services coming on the market this year, we're starting to see some of the absurdities. There was the Peacock promo masquerading as a "30 Rock" reunion and Quibi's confusing move to take itself to the drive-through.
But expanding overseas is crucial to winning the streaming wars, and as Ashley Rodriguez shows, legacy media companies like Disney and Warner Media face hurdles that the tech giant rivals like Netflix don't in lining up customers overseas.
In a jittery job market, it's no surprise some of our top stories this past month dealt with getting a job and what pay to expect. Take a look at the stories our readers most loved in August:
