Wal-Mart Gets Into The SEM Business?

In a bid to diversify its holdings in the realm occupied by its Web-based business, Wal-Mart has done something quite unpredictable and peculiar. It has launched its very own SEM service. (SEM is short for search engine marketing.)

Indeed. The company that started small and unsophisticated decades ago and grew to become the largest retail force on Earth, has apparently tapped the powers that be at Innuity, a well-known Web software specialist, and arranged to establish a marketing service within the bounds of its so-called Sam’s Club Online Services. (Just to clarify, Wal-Mart owns the Sam’s Club chain of warehouses.) The new service’s parent company hopes to sucker convince small business owners to use the consultancy to promote themselves via Google’s ad network. Or, as the site copy evidently proclaims, “in Google.”

Surely some of you will be raising your red flags at the statement above. You may attest to the fact that SEMs do provide valuable services to countless enterprises, big and small. And we’d certainly agree. They do. Sometimes. (Sometimes they don’t. Marketing is, after all, not a perfect science by any means.) Only, we wonder why it is Wal-Mart has entered the fold. Sure, it’s spent plenty of time as the advertiser. Its spots on both paper and screen blanket the country, if not the globe. But does it now wish to try its hand on the other side of the divide? Really?

Okay, suppose it does manage to eek out a substantial customer base with the new Sam’s Club Online Services addition. Suppose then that, as a result of such business, it garners a portion of the income derived from Google by way of its ad network. And by portion we mean a sliver of a sliver. What then? Will the company be content to manage SEM for clients that wish to do business through Big G? One can’t possibly presume that that is the extent of its plan – whatever its plan may in fact be. If that is so, Wal-Mart is no doubt headed in a direction that certainly won’t be worth its while.

To be fair, we, along with numerous other observers here on the great big WWW, are almost entirely in the dark as to the motive behind this initiative. We don’t know if it’s a minor experiment or the start of something the heads at HQ hope will be bigger than big.

As SCOS stands now, however, we must join in with common opinion and consider it (for the time being) thoroughly unimpressive. Perhaps even borderline ridiculous.

What’s your take on the service? Interesting? Poorly conceived? Not worth another word of discussion? Share your thoughts in the comments below.