Walmart’s 38% ad growth is turning retail media into an operating-margin lever, and procurement teams should treat Connect like a platform, not a channel

Walmart’s fiscal second-quarter filing landed with a number retail media teams will end up repeating internally: 38% global ad revenue growth. Walmart also raised its full-year adjusted EPS guidance to $2.80 to $2.87 per share, up from $2.75 to $2.85, after reporting $187.9 billion in total revenue, according to Adweek’s coverage of the results.

For operators, the story is less about a retailer beating estimates and more about what Walmart is signaling about its profit engine. The company’s leadership explicitly linked advertising growth to the potential for higher incremental margins, which changes how brands should plan budgets, measurement, and vendor governance inside Walmart Connect.

The earnings print makes ads a margin assumption, not a side business

Adweek reported Walmart’s total revenue rose 5.9% year over year to $187.9 billion and adjusted EPS came in at $0.81 versus a $0.74 Wall Street estimate cited by S&P Capital IQ. The same report pegged global ecommerce sales growth at 23% year over year, 24% in the U.S.

Those numbers matter because Walmart is drawing a direct line between faster-growing ad dollars and how it expects to manage profitability. CFO John David Rainey described advertising as the variable that would need to outpace ecommerce for incremental margins to climb, according to Adweek’s account of the call.

That framing tends to show up downstream in how inventory is prioritized, how promotions are negotiated, and how quickly a platform team asks brands to adopt new measurement standards. For enterprise brands, the operational implication is straightforward: retail media commitments inside Walmart can start to resemble trade spend in their scrutiny and cadence, complete with tighter performance reporting and faster iteration requirements.

Walmart Connect’s 43% U.S. growth, plus Vizio and Vibe.co, points to a single buy across store, site, and TV

Adweek put a second growth figure on the table that’s more specific than the usual “ads were up”: Walmart Connect grew 43% in the U.S. during the quarter, excluding Vizio. That exclusion is a clue. Walmart is still separating the core retail media operation from the streaming ad assets it has been assembling.

Earlier this month, Walmart closed its acquisition of self-serve CTV platform Vibe.co, a deal Adweek said was reportedly valued at $1.4 billion. Walmart’s earlier Vizio transaction in 2024 gave it another lever: a TV operating system footprint and an ad business that already sells into the streaming ecosystem, as Adweek previously reported.

Roll those together and the practical change for marketing ops teams is that Walmart Connect is expanding into CTV in a way that will likely push toward unified audience definitions and unified reporting across onsite retail media and streaming inventory. This would matter most for brands that currently split ownership between shopper marketing and brand video teams, with separate agencies, separate pixels, and separate success criteria.

Sparky is a new conversion surface, and Walmart is already monetizing it

Walmart is also pushing AI shopping as both a commerce feature and an ad surface. Adweek reported that Walmart’s AI shopping agent, Sparky, is now carrying ads, and that Walmart said Sparky shoppers spend 40% more per order than non-users. Walmart also said the number of customers using Sparky is up 70% from last year, according to the same report.

Taken at face value, the 40% figure is a basket-economics signal, not a vanity metric. If an agent interface nudges consumers toward higher-priced bundles, higher attachment, or fewer out-of-stocks, then the best-performing “ad” might be a SKU-level data feed, content enrichment, or fulfillment reliability rather than a bigger bid.

It’s also a governance issue. If AI-assisted shopping starts to mediate product discovery, then content operations and master data management become part of media performance. Brands with high SKU churn, regulated claims, or multiple pack sizes will want clear internal ownership for what product attributes are authoritative and how quickly they can be updated across Walmart’s surfaces.

Where this lands for operators writing 2026 media and data specs

Walmart’s corporate messaging at Cannes in June positioned its goal as a unified global commerce media system spanning in-store, ecommerce, marketplace, offsite media, membership, and CTV under chief growth officer Seth Dallaire, according to Walmart’s corporate newsroom post. Adweek’s earnings coverage suggests the pieces are now being judged in financial terms, not just in product terms.

The procurement and platform takeaway is that Walmart Connect buys are trending toward “full-stack” contracts: media inventory plus data access plus measurement plus creative requirements for CTV and new AI surfaces. That can be efficient, but it also raises integration work that sits between marketing, IT, and finance.

A useful benchmark from this quarter is the growth spread itself: ads up 38% globally against 23% global ecommerce growth, per Adweek. If that gap persists, expect Walmart to keep prioritizing features and policies that defend ad measurement credibility, expand addressable inventory, and make self-serve easier for smaller advertisers, including through Vibe.co’s tooling.

Questions to bring to the next Walmart Connect QBR, and to your agency SOW

• How will Walmart define “unified” measurement across Walmart Connect, Vizio inventory, and Vibe.co self-serve CTV, and which metrics will be accepted as comparable in quarterly business reviews (ROAS, iROAS/incrementality, new-to-brand, basket lift)?
• What identity and data-sharing model will be required for cross-surface reporting, and where will first-party customer data be processed and retained (clean room terms, retention windows, and permissioning)?
• If Sparky becomes a material conversion path in the category, what are the controllable inputs beyond bids, for example product content completeness, attribute standards, and fulfillment SLAs for promoted SKUs, and who on the Walmart side owns that feedback loop?