Walmart Retail Media Grows 41% as Vizio Deal Extends Advertising Beyond the Store

February 24, 2026 by guest author, John Berkovich

Walmart’s retail media business continued its rapid growth trajectory in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, with advertising revenue rising 41 percent year over year, underscoring how aggressively the large retailer is positioning itself as a media platform as much as a merchant.

According to Walmart’s latest earnings report, the company’s global advertising operations – branded under Walmart Connect in the U.S. – delivered strong gains driven by expanded advertiser participation, improved data targeting, and deeper integration across digital and physical retail channels.

While Walmart did not disclose how much of the growth came specifically from in-store retail media, the company’s acquisition of smart TV manufacturer Vizio in early 2025 is widely viewed as a major contributor to the accelerating ad business. The deal added a large connected-TV footprint and operating-system-level advertising capabilities, extending Walmart’s reach from store aisles and e-commerce platforms into consumers’ living rooms.

While Walmart continues to invest in in-store screens and physical retail media, most of the revenue growth is still coming from digital advertising and connected TV, where campaigns scale faster, and measurement is far easier. Industry analysts generally estimate that in-store retail media represents a relatively small share of total retail media revenue compared with e-commerce search advertising and connected TV campaigns, despite growing industry attention on store-based media networks.

The strategy reflects a broader shift among major retailers toward building closed-loop advertising ecosystems that connect shopper data, media inventory, and purchase attribution. By combining retail transaction data with connected TV exposure and in-store analytics systems, Walmart can offer advertisers measurable campaigns spanning online shopping, physical stores, and household media consumption.

Retail media has emerged as one of Walmart’s fastest-growing and highest-margin business segments, mirroring a wider industry trend as brands increasingly redirect marketing budgets toward environments tied directly to sales outcomes rather than traditional mass media channels like linear TV.

The continued expansion places Walmart in closer competition with retail media leaders such as Amazon while reinforcing the growing importance of screens from shelf-edge displays and digital signage networks to connected televisions as core infrastructure for modern retail advertising strategies.

Although Walmart provided limited detail on its in-store deployments, industry observers expect continued investment in physical retail media as retailers look to monetize store traffic and extend digital advertising models into brick-and-mortar environments.

With advertising now embedded across commerce, content, and connected devices, Walmart’s latest results signal that retail media is evolving from an experimental revenue stream into a foundational pillar of large-scale retail strategy.

(Images: Walmart Connect/Vizio)