Walmart unifies global ad business around commerce media strategy

Walmart is tightening its advertising business across Walmart U.S., Walmart International and Sam’s Club, with Seth Dallaire leading a commerce media strategy built around scale, solutions and signals. The June 22 move links Walmart Connect U.S., Walmart Connect International and Sam’s Club more closely through shared technology, tools, platforms and capabilities, which puts ad sales, store execution and ecommerce planning on the same track.

For hourly associates and managers, the change is less about banners and more about workflow. Walmart is pushing more campaigns that connect stores, ecommerce, membership and measurable shopper behavior, which means more tightly choreographed product placements, seasonal pushes and omnichannel events. That can change what gets priority on the sales floor, what merchants want featured, and how quickly store teams have to react when a campaign is tied to a promotion, a pickup push or a media buy.

The company is betting that first-party data and integrated measurement will sharpen those decisions. That also raises the coordination burden on digital, media and operations staff, because the same shopper signals now shape both selling strategy and execution. In practice, Walmart is telling its teams that store work and media work are no longer separate lanes. The ad business now sits inside the same operating rhythm as merchandising, fulfillment and customer traffic.

The scale behind that shift is already substantial. Walmart said its global advertising business grew about 28% to $3.4 billion in fiscal 2024 and reached $4.4 billion by April 2025. The company completed its roughly $2.3 billion VIZIO acquisition in December 2024, adding a connected TV footprint that it has used to push deeper into shoppable media. A day after the June 22 strategy update, Walmart said it would acquire Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform for small and mid-sized brands.

Sam’s Club is now part of the same broader play. Its Member Access Platform uses more than 40 years of first-party deterministic membership data and has been positioned as the first Retail Experience Network. Sam’s Club has added Brand Lift, Customer Lifetime Value, Multi-Touch Attribution, Propensity Modeling and Omni-Impact to its measurement stack, while expanding in-club media through Omni Experiences, Fuel Screen Ads and In-Club Audio Ads.

Walmart Connect has also widened programmatic and offsite access, including Yahoo DSP for VIZIO inventory. The result is a more centralized advertising model flowing out of Bentonville and into stores, clubs, fulfillment and digital teams, with more of Walmart’s retail decisions shaped by the demands of media revenue.