The news: Walmart’s ad business is quickly becoming a core growth engine. In its fiscal Q1 2026 results, the company reported that global advertising revenues jumped 50% YoY, with Walmart Connect—the retailer’s US retail media arm—rising 31%. That performance includes early gains from its Vizio acquisition, as the company begins linking retail data to streaming inventory in a closed-loop environment.

• Executives also emphasized the role of retail media in offsetting margin pressure from tariffs and inflation. With adjusted operating income rising 3% and ecommerce sales up 22%, Walmart is using high-margin ad revenues to shore up profitability.
• At the same time, Walmart also addressed the mounting cost pressure from Trump-era tariffs, with CEO Doug McMillon confirming that price increases are on the way for some goods, particularly electronics and food categories.

Zooming out: During the company’s April investor day, Walmart unveiled a beta offering that will give advertisers direct access to Vizio’s connected TV (CTV) inventory, further tightening the integration between shopper behavior and ad exposure. Walmart now controls the hardware (Vizio TVs), the operating system (SmartCast), and the shopping data—giving it significant control over ad delivery and measurement.

Why it matters: Walmart’s retail media operation has evolved into a major earnings contributor. With last year’s ad sales already at $3.4 billion and Q1 showing continued double-digit growth, retail media is helping the company absorb economic headwinds like rising import costs without passing them directly to consumers.

This push also opens new doors for non-endemic advertisers, especially through Walmart’s growing network of fuel and convenience locations, which offer fresh behavioral data and impulse purchase opportunities. Fifty-eight percent of US ad buyers plan to increase their use of first-party data in 2025, and Walmart is clearly ready to meet that demand.

Our take: With Vizio under its wing, Walmart now controls both the screen and the shopping data—giving advertisers a single, closed-loop platform for targeting and measurement. And by expanding SmartCast beyond Vizio-branded TVs, it’s turning that hardware investment into a scalable software play that deepens household reach without needing more devices.