Walmart Isn’t Just a Retailer Anymore — it’s an Advertising Powerhouse

When most people think about data companies, they think about Big Tech: companies like Meta and Google, which made their billions by acquiring and deploying user information. But the fact is, in 2026, virtually every sufficiently large business is a data company, no matter what its ostensible function is. And some of these data companies, excitingly, are starting to meaningfully compete with the Silicon Valley giants for advertising dollars.

Case in point: the tremendous recent success of Walmart Connect, the digital advertising arm of the national retail giant. Since launching in 2021, Walmart Connect's revenues have soared, earning $4.4 billion in 2024 (a 27 percent increase from the previous year). This has put Walmart at the leading edge of what analysts are calling retail media networks (i.e., advertising that takes place on a retailer's owned properties), among a class that includes such major players as Amazon.com, Target, Kroger, and Costco.

The success of these platforms at this particular moment in digital advertising history comes as no surprise: the digital ads landscape has changed beyond recognition since COVID, and brands today are scrambling for effective ways to reach increasingly fickle customers. In Walmart Connect, we can see the whole story of post-COVID digital advertising in miniature.

What is Walmart Connect?

First, though, a word on how Walmart Connect actually works.

It's relatively straightforward, and it centers on first-party data. If the value proposition of a company like Meta is a unique insight into its customers' potential shopping habits, Walmart goes a step further: the platform offers more granular data on its customers' actual shopping habits. Given that the Venn-Diagram of "Walmart Shoppers" and "Americans" is very nearly a circle, this means Walmart Connect can put a massively wide range of data at the service of the brands that advertise with it.

These advertisements appear across Walmart's owned properties. That could mean conventional sponsored product listings or display ads on Walmart's site, but it could also mean ads in Walmart's retail stores, on the many screens prominently displayed at its thousands of locations. Notably, it can also mean ads outside of Walmart's owned properties, on social media platforms, or on connected TVs.

The benefits here are more or less obvious. Social media use is passive: people scroll Instagram to kill time or to engage with specific creators. But no one visits Walmart's website — let alone Walmart's stores — because they're bored. They visit because they want to shop. Walmart Connect allows brands to target consumers with present-tense intent: people who are actively looking to buy something.

Why Now?

It's no secret that the digital advertising landscape is in flux at this particular moment. Fewer users are engaging with conventional websites. The social media platforms continue to offer less for more, with Facebook ad costs alone spiking 21 percent in 2025. Increasingly, too, users are bypassing traditionally ad-friendly zones in favor of artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT, whose just-announced advertising program is in its infancy (and which users are already pushing back against). And all of this comes at a time when advertisers are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate tangible return on investment.

Walmart, which ties advertising exposure directly to sales data, offers the kind of "closed loop" measurement unavailable to conventional ad platforms. Brands can see not only who viewed a particular ad, but also who purchased it, as well as what they purchased. This adds much-needed clarity to a process that has grown murkier and more tangled with each passing year.

The Role of the Modern Ad Stack

None of this, of course, is to suggest that conventional social spend is irrelevant. Advertisers will continue to invest heavily in it, and with good reason. This reality may explain why some advertisers have been slower on the uptake when it comes to retail advertising — namely, the potential headache of having to navigate yet another complicated ad platform.

This is where the flexibility of Walmart Connect and platforms such as Amazon Ads become so important. Precisely because they've arrived late to the scene of digital advertising, they can avoid some of the pitfalls that defined its earlier days, such as the difficulty of integration. Walmart Connect, in fact, makes integration as seamless as possible, enabling partner integrations that allow advertisers to manage their Walmart campaigns from within existing digital ad platforms.

Retail advertising spend may not be as large as a piece of the pie today as social spend, but the odds are high that it will soon start to seriously compete in certain verticals (e.g., grocery and pharmaceuticals). And with advertisers rapidly losing access to third-party data and facing escalating ROI demands, the value of these closed-loop environments will continue to climb. In 2026, these platforms have definitively emerged as a permanent third pillar of digital advertising, one that advertisers can't afford to ignore.

Mitsunaga Kikuchi is the founder and CEO of Shirofune, the digital advertising management tool that automates ad campaigns through an easy-to-use interface for management, budgeting, monitoring and analytics.