Walmart is redefining retail media. One year after acquiring Vizio, Walmart Connect has surged ahead with a powerful combination of first-party shopper data and connected TV advertising. This retailer is challenging tech giants and reshaping how brands reach consumers. Beyond Walmart, digital signage specialist play an essential role.
Retail Media: Walmart Challenges Tech Giants
Amazon and Walmart may be known globally as retail powerhouses, but their real profit engines lie elsewhere. For Amazon, it is AWS. For Amazon and Walmart, it is the fast‑growing world of retail media and data‑driven advertising. One year after Walmart acquired TV manufacturer Vizio, the strategic impact on Walmart Connect is becoming unmistakable. Walmart is rapidly transforming from a traditional retailer into a vertically integrated media company with reach across its 4600 stores, online platforms and, increasingly, the living room screen.
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The acquisition of Vizio in December 2024 for USD 2.2 billion (invidis report) marked a turning point in the U.S. retail media landscape. Walmart, already one of the country’s largest sellers of TVs through its physical stores, gained not primarily a TV manufacturer but a proprietary smart TV operating system with deeply embedded advertising capabilities. Since then, Roku, long a prominent player in CTV advertising and also rooted in digital signage history through its joined Brightsign heritage, has been losing ground as Walmart pushes its own ecosystem.
The timing could not have been better. The U.S. retail media market grew by around twenty percent in 2025, but Walmart Connect expanded significantly faster. The company reported thirty‑three percent growth in the last quarter alone, driven by online placements, in‑app advertising, in‑store screens and especially connected TV. When including the contribution of Vizio, Walmart’s global advertising business grew by more than fifty percent. The addition of a proprietary Connected TV platform has allowed Walmart to capture new revenue streams from non-endemic like automotive, financial services and quick‑service restaurants. Some of these new clients now rank among the largest spenders on the Walmart DSP.
The strategic value of the Vizio integration becomes clear in how Walmart combines its first‑party shopper data with CTV delivery. Vizio advertisers can target audiences based on verified Walmart shopping behaviour and measure the direct sales impact generated by campaigns shown on Vizio devices.
The company is rolling out the Vizio operating system to its private‑label Onn TV line, a move that could extend the OS’s reach to between a quarter and a third of all U.S. households. Such scale would place Walmart among the most influential CTV platform owners in the market, with a closed ecosystem reaching from hardware to measurement.
Impact on SoC-Platforms
Walmart and Amazon are the most important sales channel for TVs from Samsung, LG & Co. Their most important channel partner becomes now a serious competitor not only for TVs but also new competition for Google Android, Samsung Tizen and LG WebOS and their ambitious Ad-sales goals. The fully integrated Ad business model works tremendously good – according to Walmart Connect, shoppers exposed to CTV ads are twenty‑eight percent more likely to purchase products through Walmart.
The company sees a direct correlation between the number of consumer touchpoints a brand activates and the resulting increase in conversion, which strengthens its commitment to a multi-screen strategy spanning online, in-app, in-store and CTV environments.
Measurement is a central pillar of Walmart’s approach
Over the past year, the retailer has been expanding incremental return on ad spend metrics beyond display and video to include search and other formats. Brands increasingly expect consistent and comparable KPIs across all advertising surfaces, whether inside a Walmart store or on external channels. Walmart now provides closed-loop measurement across a wide array of media partners, including TikTok, Meta, TV networks and bespoke integrations such as a dedicated measurement partnership with Disney. The aim is to ensure that every impression can ultimately be tied back to sales outcomes.
While CTV is currently driving the most momentum, Walmart continues to invest heavily in the long-anticipated frontier of in-store retail media. The company is developing the hardware, adtech and measurement frameworks required to scale in-store advertising beyond pilot implementations. Importantly, Walmart emphasizes contextual relevance: bakery screens will serve food‑related messages, not generic electronics promotions. Brand lift and sales lift across in-store digital signage will become key metrics in what may emerge as the next major wave of U.S. retail media innovation.
Shopper Data is key – also for RMN-experts like Stratacache, Stingray, CRI & Co
US digital signage specialists such as Stratacache, Stingray and CRI face increasing pressure as retail media becomes a fully integrated discipline inside major retail giants. Shopper data has emerged as the decisive competitive advantage – and it is an area where vertically integrated retailers like Walmart set benchmarks that third‑party network operators cannot easily match. Stratacache’s PRN division once pioneered Walmart’s early in‑store media networks, but the era of outsourcing has ended for the world’s largest retailer. Today, Walmart controls its own retail media stack end‑to‑end, from data to measurement to CTV integration, leaving external vendors with far fewer opportunities at the very top of the market.
Across North America’s grocery, pharmacy and DIY sectors, however, the landscape looks different. While most supermarket groups now run internal retail media organisations responsible for monetisation and data strategy, the design, rollout and technical operation of in‑store networks remain largely in the hands of digital signage specialists. Stratacache and Stingray dominate these large‑scale deployments, but competition is intensifying as CRI, Wovenmedia and others position themselves as full‑service RMN partners for retailers that lack Walmart‑level resources. The battle for retail media network leadership beyond Amazon and Walmart is therefore shifting to supermarket and DIY chains, where operational expertise, flexible infrastructure and the ability to align with retailer‑owned shopper data will define the winners.
