Hasta La Creative!

Once it became a true national retail presence in the late 1990s, Walmart had a big advantage over regional competitors: It could buy national TV, and they couldn’t.

Now Walmart is giving up some of that edge as it plows a growing portion of its TV budget into spot, rolling out price-comparison ads against local retailers in 60 markets this year, up from 50 last year. It’s part of a plan that will see Walmart produce an eye-popping 1,500 TV ads in 2013. That’s more than double the 615-plus it ran in all of 2012, which itself was up substantially from a year earlier, when new local ads up 79%, according to Advertising Benchmark Index, which tracks consumer response to most new ads in the U.S.

It’s all part of Walmart’s effort to apply the real-time marketing popular in social media to TV, said people familiar with the campaign, though that does come at considerable cost in terms of production and spot media buys.

Continue reading at AdAge.com