Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the morning of November 3, Beijing time, it was reported that Ryan Mayward, vice president of advertising sales at Instacart, the US fresh ecommerce company, announced on the white-collar social networking site LinkedIn that he had left Instacart to join Walmart.

Mr Mayward has become the third advertising executive to move from Instacart in the past year, raising questions about whether the advertising ambitions of Fidji Simo, Instacart's chief executive, can become a reality.

Advertising executives left just two weeks before Mr Mayward left, Instacart sent a notice to all employees that the original listing plan would be postponed. Previously, the company was expected to go public by the end of the year.

In the second half of last year, Seth Dallaire, Instacart's former head of advertising, also left the company to become Wal-Mart's chief revenue officer, whose job responsibilities include advertising revenue.

Previously, Mayward was a subordinate to Dalare at Instacart. After job-hopping, Maywald will continue to report to Dalare at Walmart. It is reported that Maywald's position at Wal-Mart is the senior vice president in charge of sales for its advertising platform Wal-Mart connection. On Monday, Maywald began a new career journey at Wal-Mart.

It is worth mentioning that in July, Chris Rogers, Instacart's chief commercial officer, expanded his mandate to take charge of retail and advertising.

An Instacart spokesman told the press that he was still confident about the future of the company's advertising business, highlighting the shopping video and advertising services launched by Instacart last year.

The core business of Instacart's $10 billion target is to run errands and deliver goods to your door, but the company has launched an advertising business with a large number of users and currently sells advertising space in its clients to about 5500 consumer brands, including Pepsi, Kraft Foods, Campbell and so on. In advertising, Instacart has challenged retail peers such as Kroger, Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon.

Last year, Instacart conducted a round of financing, valuing the company at $39 billion. At that time, the management said that the advertising department would contribute at least $10 billion a year in the future.

However, since this round of financing, Instacart's business prospects are becoming more and more challenging. This year, the company has begun to lay off staff and cut expenses. Instacart management has cut its valuation by 2/3 this year, leaving only $13 billion, according to a US technology media report.

Instacart's advertising revenue has been growing, but it is still much smaller than the core errand purchasing agency business. Instacart is expected to generate $800m in advertising revenue this year, up 45 per cent from $555 million last year, according to eMarketer, a US technology market research firm.

A spokesman for Instacart said that in the third quarter of this year, the company's revenue from advertising and related businesses increased by more than 30% compared with the same period last year. However, the spokesman did not want to disclose specific figures.

Instacart's current revenue mainly comes from fresh food sales, and the advertising business is forming a new revenue engine. In the second quarter of this year, the company's overall revenue rose 39% from a year earlier to $621 million. According to an authoritative financial media report, the company was already profitable in the second quarter.

According to LinkedIn, Mayward joined Instacart in March 2021. At the time, Instacart planned to expand its client-side advertising business, a strategy that led to the departure of many Amazon advertising executives to join Instacart.

At the time, Instacart also diverted advertising talent from another tech giant, Meta (then known as Facebook), and current CEO Simon and former president Carolyn Everson were all from Meta. But at the end of last year, after Dalare left Instacart, so did Evershan.She had only been working for the company for three months.

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