This week's episode of the excellent "Retail Media Therapy" podcast re-sparked my interest in Walmart's data and insights platform. Hosts Viv Craske and Colin Lewis discussed Walmart's recent rebrand of Luminate to "Scintilla" and offered an intriguing theory about its future direction that prompted me to dig deeper.

The Scintilla Rebrand: More Than Just a New Name?

In October 2024, Walmart announced that Luminate will rebrand to "Scintilla" in 2025. The Latin term means "spark," which Walmart describes as "signifying the power of a single insight to ignite a new idea." While this might seem like a simple rebrand, what caught my attention was Colin's observation that the name deliberately omits "Walmart" – potentially indicating bigger ambitions.

Colin goes on to suggest that this may signal Walmart's intention to develop Scintilla into a standalone business that might eventually serve other retailers and CPG companies beyond the Walmart ecosystem. He points out that Walmart's press release mentions "expansion to new markets and banners" and transformation of "retail strategies across the entire value chain" – language that suggests broader applications beyond Walmart's own operations.

This theory gained further credibility with Walmart's launch of "In-Home User Tests," allowing suppliers to send products to Walmart-verified customers for feedback on packaging, messaging, and other attributes – pushing Scintilla beyond pure retail data into broader consumer insights territory.

Comparing Data Solutions: The Retail Media Landscape

To fully understand Walmart's positioning with Scintilla, we need to examine the broader retail media data ecosystem. Major retailers have developed distinctive data and insights platforms that reflect their unique advantages and customer relationships. Each offers brands different capabilities for targeting, measurement, and personalization.

This landscape comparison becomes particularly relevant when we consider how brands must navigate these various platforms to execute sophisticated marketing strategies. Later in this debrief, I'll explore how Clorox is putting this into practice with their ambitious goal of making 50% of their marketing spend personalized on a 1-to-1 basis by 2030 - a real-world application that illustrates why understanding each platform's strengths is crucial for modern marketers.

When comparing major retail data solutions, each offers distinct advantages aligned with their parent companies' strengths:

Walmart Scintilla (formerly Luminate)

• Core Focus: Retail and supply chain insights with strong emphasis on store-level data, inventory management, and shopper behavior
• Key Strengths: Omni-channel data combining physical stores and online, detailed operational metrics, and collaboration with Walmart merchants
• Unique Selling Point: Unparalleled store-level granularity and operational intelligence. 140 million customers shop in Walmart's U.S. stores each week
• Key Challenge: Lacks a true self-service clean room environment for brands to blend their first-party data with Walmart's shopper data

Amazon's Data Ecosystem

• Multiple Platforms: Unlike Walmart's consolidated approach with Scintilla, Amazon's retail insights are fragmented across several platforms:Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA): Provides 1P vendors with sales, inventory, and demand forecastsSeller Central Business Reports: Offers 3P sellers metrics on sales, traffic, and inventory healthBrand Analytics: Gives registered brand owners search data, market basket analysis, and demographic insightsAmazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): A "clean room" environment focused on marketing measurement and attribution
• Key Strengths: Advanced digital advertising measurement, audience targeting, and cross-channel orchestration when these platforms are used together
• Unique Selling Point: Sophisticated marketing analytics, but requires brands to navigate multiple tools and synthesize data across platforms to achieve Scintilla-level operational insights. One area where Amazon has a unique advantage is in offering a true marketing "clean room" solution. Amazon Marketing Cloud allows advertisers to securely join their own first-party data with Amazon's campaign and retail data without exposing user-level information, in an entirely self-serve manner.
• Key Challenge: Fragmented ecosystem requires brands to stitch together insights from multiple platforms, with limited store-level data compared to Walmart

Kroger's 84.51°

• Core Focus: Loyalty-based consumer insights and hyper-personalized marketing
• Key Strengths: Deep household-level purchase history via loyalty card data and precision targeting.  Robust data analytics, audience targeting, and closed-loop measurement—often via a managed or semi-managed approach.
• Unique Selling Point: Grocery-specific personalization at the individual shopper level, based on 60 million US households that use a Kroger Plus Card or a similar loyalty identifier.
• Key Challenge: Limited reach beyond grocery categories and Kroger shoppers, requiring brands to supplement with other platforms for comprehensive consumer coverage

Case Study: Clorox's Path to 1-to-1 Personalization

A perfect example of how these different data solutions come together is Clorox's ambitious goal to make 50% of its media spend personalized on a 1-to-1 basis by 2030. Path To Purchase Institute covered the brand's presentation at the recent CAGNY investors conference, where Clorox said it has already built data records for 100 million known users – a milestone they reached ahead of schedule.

CEO Linda Rendle shared that the company envisions moving beyond targeting broad demographics to delivering hyper-specific content to individuals like "Carla," a mom with a toddler and two teens on a health journey, or "Steve," a college student who moved from Texas to Wisconsin and orders pizza on Wednesday nights.

So we can put theory into practice, let's consider how Clorox would need to leverage the unique strengths of each retailer's insights platform in order to achieve this goal.

Amazon Marketing Cloud

For Clorox, AMC offers the most robust environment for digital personalization at scale. They could upload segments from their 100 million user database and match them with Amazon's shopper data to create micro-targeted campaigns across Amazon properties and through Amazon DSP.

Walmart Scintilla + Connect

Walmart's strength lies in bridging online and in-store experiences. Clorox has already seen success with this approach, as Rendle mentioned their bespoke experiences targeting college tailgating fans for Kingsford barbecue products at Walmart and Sam's Club, which drove increased merchandising lifts. Scintilla's operational insights ensure products are available where and when personalized marketing drives demand.

Kroger's 84.51°

For grocery-specific personalization, 84.51° offers the deepest household-level data. This would be particularly valuable for brands like Hidden Valley (which Rendle specifically mentioned) to target shoppers like "Carla" with personalized healthy snack recommendations based on her family's specific needs and shopping habits.

The Integration Challenge

For Clorox to achieve its 50% personalized media goal, the key challenge will be orchestrating across these platforms. No single retail data solution covers all consumer touchpoints, so brands need a "central brain" – an internal data lake or Customer Data Platform where they can merge insights from these different retail environments.

This is where Walmart's potential expansion of Scintilla becomes particularly interesting. If Scintilla evolves into a cross-retail solution as Colin and Viv suggested on their Retail Media Therapy podcast, it could potentially solve a significant pain point for brands like Clorox trying to coordinate personalization across multiple retail channels.

Looking Ahead

As retail media networks continue to evolve, we can expect further convergence between data insights and advertising activation. Walmart's recent launch of "Luminate Insights Activation" – integrating Luminate/Scintilla with Walmart Connect – represents their first significant step toward connecting their insights platform with their advertising capabilities.

The question remains whether Walmart will develop its own clean room solution to match Amazon Marketing Cloud's capabilities, or if Scintilla might eventually grow beyond Walmart to serve other retailers – potentially becoming a significant player in the retail analytics space independent of its parent company.

For brands pursuing advanced personalization like Clorox, the retail data landscape may remain fragmented in the near term, requiring sophisticated data strategies that leverage the unique strengths of each platform while building internal capabilities to unify these insights.