Walmart moves to grab a bigger chunk of the TV ad business

Walmart is taking its ad business to the TV screen.

On Tuesday, Walmart exclusively told CMO Insider that advertisers can now use its shopper targeting and measurement data on linear TV through a new partnership with Warner Bros.

Discovery, which is merging with Paramount to form Skydance.

The move positions Walmart more favorably in its pursuit of the big brand budgets traditionally spent on TV, and beyond the performance marketing spend that typically accounts for the largest share of its Walmart Connect ad business.

It’s also the latest sign of retail media giants further expanding into new media beyond their own stores, sites, and apps.

Walmart’s pitch to advertisers is that they can reach its millions of shoppers and measure whether those ads drove purchases through its sales data.

Those properties naturally have a finite amount of advertising inventory, so the company has been ramping up efforts to help advertisers target Walmart shoppers elsewhere.

Walmart acquired the TV-maker Vizio in 2024, helping it tap into connected-TV ad budgets.

This year, it scooped up the adtech firm Vibe.co, which also focuses on streaming TV, as part of a plan to pursue small- and medium-sized advertisers.

Walmart’s ad revenue reached $6.4 billion in 2025.

Khurrum Malik, Walmart Connect VP of business and product marketing, told CMO Insider the WBD deal came about because advertisers and agencies had asked for the capability.

Advertisers’ audiences are split across CTV and linear, but advertisers want consistent targeting and measurement across both, he said.

Walmart advertisers can access this linear inventory via a private marketplace deal on its demand-side platform.

It includes WBD networks such as TBS, TLC, and TruTV, and can include live sports when those networks carry them.

Walmart has experimented with linear TV before: In 2024, it partnered with NBCUniversal to make “shoppable” ads available on its live Thanksgiving sports programming via Walmart’s DSP.

Malik said he envisioned Walmart expanding into more non-digital channels. “We want to start slow and then go fast,” Malik said. “I could see us scaling as the solution works for advertisers.” Walmart isn’t alone in chasing TV ad budgets in the fast-growing retail media space.

Arch-rival Amazon — whose ad business reached $68 billion in 2025 — has spent years extending its trove of shopping data into streaming TV on Prime Video and through partnerships with Netflix, Disney, and Roku.

Walmart is trying to differentiate itself by making its data available through competitor ad-buying tools, too.

Also on Tuesday, Walmart announced that Yahoo DSP advertisers can target its audiences on Vizio and other CTV publishers through a partnership with the supply-side platform Magnite.

Additionally, it announced a partnership between the Walmart DSP and Spotify across audio, video, and display ads. “We want to make it easier for them to buy how they buy today, instead of forcing somebody into one DSP that really conquers them all,” Malik said. “I think about us as a friendly garden,” he added.

That’s in contrast to “walled gardens” — like Meta or YouTube — that require advertisers to use the platform’s own buying tools to access its ad inventory.

Kevin Dunn, chief revenue officer of Experian Marketing Services, said he expects more retail media to move “offsite” into CTV and other web properties. “I expect the conversation to shift from ‘which networks should we be in?’ to ‘how do we make them work together?'” Dunn said.

The retail media space is growing rapidly, with spending set to top $203 billion this year, per Business Insider sister company EMARKETER.

However, with more than 200 retail media networks worldwide, the space is becoming increasingly crowded, and some advertising pros have been calling for more consistent standards and language for measuring their effectiveness.

A recent ISBA and MediaSense audit of five UK retail media networks found inconsistent metrics across them, including five different definitions of an “attributed sale.” Malik said Walmart works with third-party measurement firms alongside offering its own first-party data. “As commerce media moves into a broader media mix, its accountability has to go with it,” Malik said.

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