TechCrunch announced earlier this week that Walmart, the world’s 18^th largest company, acquired a small mobile and social ad targeting start-up called OneRiot, joining the retailer’s Walmart Labs initiative. Love them or hate them, Wallmart has just given the rest of the industry a wakeup call.

It’s not the first company Walmart has acquired and it certainly won’t be the last. So why is this important? Retail and mobile are intrinsically linked. Research from comScore has indicated that 70% of those using mobile for holiday (read Christmas) shopping are using them in-store, where purchases are being influenced on the spot. Retailers know they need to be engaging consumers on mobile. They know that while they’re in store, they’re mobile is on and frequently being referred to.  Love them or hate them, this is a smart move from Walmart. They could have partnered up with a provider, but why do that when it had an income last year of $15.4bn and just buy in to the game.

By acquiring RiotOne, Walmart hold all the cards. It not only makes significant headway in to the mobile and social, real-time ad space, but maintains complete control of all their customer data. From a customer point of view, sharing data with just Walmart is preferential to sharing it between two or even three third parties. Make no mistake, Walmart are building something big. Walmart already acquired social media start-up Kosmix earlier this year, so it’s clear that social and mobile is going to form a big part of Walmart’s future as it tries to catch up with Amazon.

Supermarkets already have huge amounts of data around our shopping habits; just look how online grocery shopping has developed to now have all your favourites waiting for you in your shopping basket. You don’t have to do anything; all your regular purchases are already in your basket. What this acquisition gives Walmart however is a platform providing access to public data streams to build profiles and the ability to deliver incredibly relevant, timely ads to customers, not just when they’re in store.

Yes Walmart is a US brand, but remember Asda is part of that brand ‘family’ and it will be interesting to see how the likes of Tesco will compete against this, apart from offering free Wi-Fi in store. So far all ‘social’ has meant to retailers is a Facebook page…possibly a Twitter account. This could indeed be the wake-up call the retail industry needs in terms of using mobile and social to engage their customers with relevant content, resulting in others following suit.

The flipside of this is that it could be another example of a massive company buying an innovative start-up only to let it fall by the wayside. Which will it be? Only time will tell. But one thing’s for sure, marketing is no longer an art. It’s a science. The most successful brands will be those with the most data and the ones who provide the most analysis and measurement on that data.