Beyond ROAS: How Walmart Connect Helps Emerging Brands Win Market Share

Retail media makes performance easy to measure, but sustainable growth is harder to achieve. As competition increases across Walmart’s digital shelves, many emerging brands optimize toward short-term ROAS without realizing they are limiting long-term market share growth.

Salomon Kim, Senior Director and Head of General Merchandise and Fashion Apparel, Emerging Brands at Walmart Connect, explains why relevancy and market share are the real drivers of durable performance inside Walmart’s omnichannel ecosystem.

Drawing on nearly a decade at Amazon and his current role supporting emerging brands at Walmart Connect, Salomon breaks down how Walmart evaluates advertising effectiveness, why advertising cannot compensate for poor relevance, and why brands that invest in market share earlier are better positioned as costs and competition increase.

He reframes advertising as real estate across Walmart’s digital shelves and physical stores, and explains why different Walmart Connect ad products serve distinct jobs across the shopper journey, from introduction and acquisition to conversion.

For Walmart suppliers and sellers navigating rising ad costs, increasing seller density, and pressure to demonstrate efficiency, this session provides a clear framework for making smarter media decisions without sacrificing long-term growth.

Topics Covered

• Why ROAS is a useful metric but an incomplete one
• How Walmart Connect defines relevancy as the probability a shopper will purchase
• Why advertising cannot overcome poor product or keyword relevance
• How competition is driving up the cost of winning digital shelf space
• Why gaining market share today is cheaper than trying to buy it later
• How to think about advertising as real estate across Walmart’s ecosystem
• Why different ad products serve different roles across the funnel
• A simple way to evaluate keyword relevance directly on Walmart.com
• What an emerging brand case study reveals about scaling with Walmart Connect

Rather than treating Walmart Connect as a bidding platform or performance dashboard, this episode positions it as a growth system that rewards brands who understand relevance, invest with intent, and build market position before efficiency erodes.

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