Walmart Expands Advertising Business with Self-Service Tools and Connected TV

Walmart is expanding its advertising business beyond traditional retail media by building self-service tools and broadening its connected-TV capabilities, said Ryan Mayward, General Manager of Walmart Connect. The company has evolved from a managed-service publisher model to a scalable advertising platform over the past several years.

The advertising business has margins above 70%, compared with approximately 5% for Walmart's core retail business, according to Mayward. He stated that the company views advertising profit as incremental rather than the result of shifting spending from other trade-investment categories.

Walmart is particularly focused on connected television, including opportunities to make TV advertising more accessible to smaller and local businesses through its acquisition of VIZIO in August 2023. The company has enabled Walmart audience targeting and measurement on VIZIO inventory and is working with Magnite to make Walmart Connect audience and measurement capabilities available on VIZIO inventory.

Walmart is also investing in its own shopping agent, Sparky, and working with Google and OpenAI to enable discovery of Walmart products in their agentic shopping interfaces. The company measures online ads' impact on purchases in both the Walmart app and stores, and has introduced tools to measure sales lift and incrementality across display, video, and search.