Walmart published its Q1 FY2027 earnings on May 21. US advertising revenue grew 36% year-over-year. Global advertising grew 37%. For the full fiscal year 2026, Walmart's global ad business hit $6.4 billion — a 46% increase over the prior year.
Walmart is now the second-largest retail media network in the United States. Behind only Amazon. That is not a projection; it's where the money already is. Most brand media plans haven't caught up.
What the VIZIO deal actually built
Walmart bought VIZIO to get three things: the TV hardware, the SmartCast operating system, and viewership data from tens of millions of connected TV households. Sitting on top of that is Walmart's purchase data from 4,700+ physical stores and Walmart.com transactions.
When those two datasets connect, you get a closed-loop measurement path that doesn't exist anywhere else in US advertising. A customer sees a VIZIO ad during a streaming show on Tuesday. They walk into a Walmart on Friday and buy the product. Walmart Connect records that conversion. Your current attribution stack (Meta pixel, Google tag, whichever multi-touch model you're running) does not.
This is deterministic attribution for TV advertising, grounded in point-of-sale receipts rather than probabilistic identity matching. The difference matters more every year as cookieless targeting tightens.
Where the beta stands right now
Walmart is currently giving Walmart Connect advertisers direct access to VIZIO streaming inventory through the Connect platform. CPMs are running in the $18–25 range, in line with premium CTV and well below the effective cost of proving TV impact through traditional brand lift studies.
The catch: rollout is prioritized for brands already on the Walmart supplier side. DTC brands without significant Walmart.com distribution are lower priority. If you qualify, check with your Walmart Connect rep this week — inventory positions for peak season fill up early.
Retail media is not just Amazon anymore
For most of the past five years, "retail media" meant Amazon. Sponsored Products if your brand was on the platform, DSP if you had the budget. Everything else (Target Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, Instacart) was ancillary in most brand media plans.
Walmart's numbers make that framing outdated. The US retail media market overall hit $71 billion in 2026, up from $60 billion in 2025. Walmart is growing faster than the market. The Walmart Connect sponsored product auction has gotten meaningfully more competitive in the past 12 months — CPCs have moved, and new entrants from outside the traditional Walmart supplier base are bidding in.
The practical consequence: brands running Amazon-only retail media plans are working with an incomplete view of where retail-intent consumers are. Amazon's search ad revenue is growing at 17.6%. Walmart's advertising revenue is growing at 36–50% depending on which metric you pull. One of these is accelerating faster.
What to do with this information
If you have Walmart distribution, four things matter before Q4 planning locks in:
Pull your Walmart Connect performance report for the last 90 days. If CPCs are up 20%+ without a matching revenue improvement, your bidding strategy needs updating now, not in October.
Ask your Walmart Connect rep about VIZIO CTV beta access. Even if you're not yet eligible, understanding the measurement methodology shapes how you structure this year's CTV budget.
Model your retail media concentration. If Amazon takes more than 80% of your retail media spend and you have active Walmart distribution, that concentration is a planning risk, not a competitive advantage, when both auctions get more expensive simultaneously.
Build a performance history on Walmart Connect before the holiday inventory window opens. Walmart weights premium placement allocation toward advertisers with established account histories.
The measurement angle is the real story
Walmart's ascent is happening as the measurement infrastructure that digital advertising relies on continues to fracture. The Publicis acquisition of LiveRamp moved the probabilistic identity graph into holding company control. Third-party cookie deprecation is hitting meaningful scale. Attribution is getting harder across every channel.
Walmart has a deterministic purchase signal attached to a growing media network. That combination has genuine value as the rest of the industry patches together probabilistic identity solutions that face increasing scrutiny.
Retail media has been the defining category story of the last three years. Walmart's Q1 numbers say the next three look the same — and the VIZIO integration means the capability set is expanding, not just the revenue line.
If you want to see how retail media fits in your current channel mix and whether your attribution setup is actually capturing cross-channel purchase signals, the free audit tool at Gromerce shows you the gaps in about three minutes.
Retail media is no longer an Amazon problem — it's a planning problem, and Walmart just made the case that it's getting bigger.
Sources: Walmart IR earnings release (May 21, 2026), eMarketer Retail Media Report, ALM Corp, Search Engine Land, May 2026
