Quick Take — Walmart, in its biggest deal of the last two years, has acquired an advertising technology company

The retail giant is paying $1.4 billion for Vibe.co, a company that enables advertising via smart TVs…

The acquisition of Vibe.co is Walmart’s largest deal since itbought Vizio for $2.3 billion in 2024. Since then, Walmart has rebranded Vizio as its own brand and integrated Vizio’s operating system into its own-brand televisions already on the market. This week’s deal is a further sign that Walmart’s executives intend to invest heavily to boost the retailer’s advertising business. Some of the executives will be required to stay on for four years to manage the business.

Below is a comparison of Walmart – Amazon comparison on advertising (read ‘How Walmart became an advertising powerhouse, whilst remaining focused on the food, non-food and e-commerce businesses’) which highlights the Bentonville (Arkansas) giant’s lag behind Jeff Bezos’s company, which, moreover, has the advantage of also controlling AWS.

In Italy, it is worth highlighting Selex’s initiative.

Drafted on 24 June, updated on 28 June 2026

Quick Take — US Supreme Court: Bayer cannot be held liable for failing to include a warning about the risk of cancer on the label of the Roundup herbicide

unless such a warning is required by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the US federal agency responsible for assessing the safety of pesticides. This ruling could drastically reduce the number of new legal cases in the United States, but it does not amount to a declaration that glyphosate is harmless. The question many are therefore asking is a different one: what do we really know today about the possible health risks?…

Francesco Forastiere, environmental epidemiologist, researcher at the CNR and lecturer at the Environmental Research Group at Imperial College London. “The ruling concerns the fact that the company cannot be penalised for failing to include a warning on the label that the EPA does not require. But this does not in any way mean that glyphosate has been declared safe for human health…

 To date,” explains Forastiere, “the IARC’s conclusion remains valid: the evidence is considered sufficient in laboratory animals and limited in humans. This justifies the classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen…”

Below: Roundup on sale at Walmart

How Walmart became an advertising powerhouse whilst remaining focused on its food, non-food and e-commerce businesses

It is a pity that no Italian company has had the scale, but above all the vision, to take on the world in the way these giants have done. In Italy, everyone thought: e-commerce must be self-sustaining. This was the case for Esselunga at home until it had no rivals, but Amazon and Walmart disprove this view. E-commerce is underpinned by other, more profitable sources of revenue