On June 23, Walmart announced its acquisition of Vibe.co, a platform that helps advertisers buy and manage connected TV advertising. The deal follows Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio, a manufacturer of smart televisions that also operates the SmartCast streaming platform, which closed in 2024. Both acquisitions give the Walmart Connect retail media network two pieces of a much larger advertising stack.
Walmart Connect, one of the fastest-growing businesses inside Walmart, allows brands to advertise to Walmart shoppers using the retailer’s first-party purchase data, both online and in stores. Advertisers like retail media networks because they link marketing activity to actual sales. Walmart knows what products consumers buy, how often they buy them, and whether advertising influenced those purchases.
Until now, Walmart’s advertising business has been closely tied to its own retail properties and audiences. Vizio and Vibe expand that reach. Vizio gives Walmart a larger footprint in connected television. Vibe gives Walmart technology that helps advertisers buy and manage streaming TV campaigns. Vizio and Vibe extend Walmart Connect beyond Walmart’s retail environment and deeper into the broader advertising ecosystem.
The Walmart Advertising Stack
Walmart’s advertising stack is beginning to look something like this:
- Walmart Connect: advertiser relationships and retail media business
- Walmart shopper data: purchase measurement
- Vizio: television footprint and viewing environment
- Vibe.co: technology for buying and managing streaming TV advertising
Vizio gave Walmart a place where ads can appear. Through Vizio’s SmartCast platform, Walmart gained access to a large connected TV audience and valuable viewing data. Vibe gives Walmart more control over how advertisers buy, manage, and measure connected TV campaigns. When an advertiser runs a streaming TV campaign, Walmart can potentially connect ad exposure to shopping behavior and more effectively answer the question every marketer asks: did the advertising lead to sales?
Retail Media Networks Are Moving Beyond Their Own Properties
Walmart is following a path Amazon and Kroger are taking. Walmart Connect’s global advertising business generated $6.4 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2026, and the way that business is growing tells you as much as the size of it. Retail media networks are no longer selling ads only on their own properties. The largest players are acquiring inventory, technology, and measurement capabilities across media channels, competing for dollars that have historically gone to television and programmatic platforms.
For example, the Amazon DSP lets brands place ads on Amazon-owned properties like Prime Video, IMDb, and Twitch, as well as across a wide range of premium third-party publishers, and it is available to brands that do not sell on Amazon at all. Amazon Marketing Cloud extends that capability by letting advertisers build custom audience segments from event-level shopper data and connect TV impressions to eventual purchase. That outcome data gives retail media networks real leverage in agency planning conversations, because it reframes a retail media buy as something closer to a television investment with verified purchase attribution. Revlon combined Prime Video with search to generate a 24x higher purchase rate compared to search-only exposure.
Kroger Precision Marketing activates programmatic audio and programmatic CTV, including placements on Roku, Paramount, and Samsung, with campaign reporting that includes incremental return on ad spend, household penetration, uplift, dollar sales, and unit sales, all tied to loyalty data. That first-party data extends to offsite advertising including social media, display networks, and connected TV.
Walmart now has television hardware through Vizio, campaign management technology through Vibe, and 280 million weekly shoppers worldwide whose purchase behavior completes the attribution picture.
Implications for Advertisers
CTV has historically been expensive to measure and difficult to connect to purchase outcomes. By merging 19 million active SmartCast accounts with 150 million weekly U.S. shoppers, Walmart can now prove a person saw an ad for a product on their Vizio TV and then used the Walmart app or a Walmart credit card to buy that product. Early campaign data supports that claim. A Cafe Bustelo campaign drove 98 percent incremental household reach beyond linear TV, and across successful campaigns run through Walmart Connect, median viewing rates hit 44 percent.
The Vibe acquisition extends that capability to a much wider range of advertisers. Vibe was designed for performance marketers without dedicated CTV teams, bringing self-serve campaign setup, targeting, and measurement to a channel that has historically required specialized buying expertise. Vibe brings more than 10,000 of its own advertisers into the Walmart Connect ecosystem, while also making CTV more accessible to Walmart Connect’s advertiser base.
Ask the Right Questions
Advertisers whose media plans treat television and retail media as separate line items, with different agency owners, different KPIs, and different buying cycles, are pricing that separation into their planning assumptions in ways that could cost them. It’s important to ask which audiences are being reached, how identity is handled, what measurement methodology is used, what outcomes can actually be attributed, and whether a campaign is designed for incremental reach, product discovery, or direct commerce impact.
For brands already buying through Walmart Connect, video creative built for traditional broadcast will not automatically transfer. A shopper might see an ad on a Vizio SmartCast TV, then purchase later on a laptop or in a store. Measuring that path requires tracking impressions and completion rates, search lift, and attributed sales, and connecting those data points to understand actual return on ad spend. Advertisers accustomed to post-campaign reporting from a third-party measurement vendor are now operating inside a system where the retailer controls both the ad inventory and the purchase data. That changes which metrics are available, how quickly they are reported, and who owns the attribution methodology.
For advertising categories like automotive that do not sell products on Walmart shelves, Vizio’s addressable CTV formats, including spots within its FAST channel WatchFree+, a dedicated sports portal, and home screen takeovers, give Walmart a way to attract advertising categories that retail media has not historically served. Those advertisers have previously bought CTV through networks or DSPs that could offer reach but not purchase verification. Walmart can now offer both.
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