In-Store Media at Walmart Now Has Real Products, Real Measurement, and Real Results. Here Is How to Use It.

Most Walmart suppliers have a line item for in-store activation somewhere in their annual plan. It usually covers displays, end caps, and feature pricing negotiated with the merchant team. It rarely covers Walmart Connect’s in-store media products, and when it does, the budget is small, the activation is limited to a handful of stores, and the measurement methodology is thin enough that no one is quite sure what it produced.

At CES 2026, Lara Barmish and Whitney Cook laid out what in-store media at Walmart can actually deliver today: how the activations work, what the measurement now shows, and how brands can use these formats to drive both brand and performance outcomes across Walmart’s physical and digital footprint.

This article draws on a CES 2026 Content Studio conversation between Barmish, Group Director and Head of Consumables at Walmart Connect, and Cook, Group Director of Sales Strategy and Enablement at Walmart Connect, supplemented by eMarketer forecast data and Walmart Connect’s Partner Connect 2025 recap where noted.

Why physical stores still matter more than the digital narrative suggests

Barmish opened the conversation with a point that set the tone for everything that followed. In a world that continues to feel increasingly digital, in-store is not just surviving but thriving. Stores have been the heartbeat of Walmart since the company started, and the scale of the physical footprint, she told Cook, remains the foundation of what Walmart Connect can offer brands.

Then she raised a finding that caught her attention. The younger generation, Gen Z shoppers, the ones we tend to assume are all shopping on TikTok or their phones, are actually going back into the physical space. She called it a really interesting opportunity for marketers to work with brands and engage across all stages of life.

Independent research supports the trend. PwC’s 2025 Holiday Outlook survey found a 10-point increase in Gen Z consumers planning to shop in-store more frequently, from 27% in 2024 to 37% in 2025, with the top motivation being the ability to touch and see products. Deloitte’s Q3 2025 Retail and Consumer Trends report found that 73% of Gen Z shop in-person at least once a week, compared to 65% of Baby Boomers.

Barmish also put the scale question in context. Eighty percent of all US retail still happens in store, she said, a figure she noted came up during a CES store walk in Las Vegas earlier that week. Cook followed with the investment gap: customers spend approximately 5.2% of their total media time inside physical stores, citing industry data, but in-store advertising accounts for only 0.1% of total ad spend across the ecosystem. She called that gap a nearly $20 billion opportunity and positioned in-store not as an emerging niche but as what will become the next major media channel.

eMarketer’s H2 2025 retail media forecast put total US retail media spending at $58.79 billion in 2025. Against that total, in-store remains a fraction of a percent of spend. eMarketer’s December 2025 forecast projects US in-store retail media ad spending will grow 33.1% in 2026.

Why this matters for suppliers: Physical retail is where 80% of US purchases still happen, and the generation most advertisers assume is digital-only is showing up in stores at rates that run counter to most planning assumptions. If your Walmart media plan treats in-store as a line item for end caps and displays while allocating the bulk of your Walmart Connect budget to digital formats, the data from both the CES conversation and independent research suggests the physical store is doing more of the purchase decision work than the current spend mix reflects.

What Walmart’s in-store ad stack delivers today

Cook walked through the current in-store ad stack in detail. Walmart now has nine different products, spanning screens, audio, and experiential formats across what Walmart’s own data reports as more than 4,600 stores.

On screens, Cook pointed to self-checkout placements as a high-focus, high-discovery moment, generating approximately 10% lift in intent. Walmart Connect’s Partner Connect 2025 recap, citing Walmart first-party data from May 2024 through April 2025, reported that self-checkout placements delivered an average 10% lift in purchase intent across statistically significant campaigns. Cook also discussed in-category screens at what she called the moment of truth, the point in the store where customers are standing in front of the product and deciding what to buy.

Barmish added proof points from her own category. She talked about beauty brands that ran customized TV screen ads, tailored for the Walmart audience with savings messages and in-store placement cues. The result: those campaigns lifted not only purchase intent but same-store sales in every store where the screens were running.

On audio, Cook talked about Walmart’s in-store audio product, launched within the past 18 months, which reaches customers across the entire store. She called it an emotional memory cue. Barmish has heard it in her own store and called it pretty impressive on Walmart Radio, noting that it feels front and center but very organic and natural to the shopping experience.

On experiential, Cook listed demos, parking lot activations, and pickup and delivery sampling. Barmish connected those to specific use cases in her categories, including fragrance launches and new snack or nutrition products being featured in stores.

Barmish then shared the performance data most relevant to the internal investment case. In-store really showed a 72% long-term brand impact and a 28% short-term gain as well. Most channels skew either heavy on brand or heavy on performance, she noted, but in-store is high on both. She also cited recent attention data showing that in-store actually outperforms every major media channel, naming TV, social, digital, and out-of-home specifically.

Why this matters for suppliers: The 72/28 brand-to-performance split is unusual. Most media formats force a tradeoff between building brand equity and driving short-term sales. In-store delivers both because the customer is already in a purchase context, ready to choose. For suppliers whose annual plans treat brand-building and performance as separate budget categories with separate measurement frameworks, in-store is a format that bridges them. The attention data Barmish cited reinforces why: customers in a physical store are more engaged than they are with a screen at home.

The measurement barrier is being removed

Cook was direct about what has held back in-store investment. You cannot just take the way you measure digital media and lift and shift it into the store footprint, she said. It does not work.

Then she explained what has changed. Over the last 18 months, Walmart Connect has built out a new way of measuring in-store formats, working with dedicated data scientists and a whole stores acceleration team alongside merchandising and advertisers. Cook called measurement one of the biggest unlocks for this year, and meant it.

Barmish picked up the thread from the platform side. We have gotten really good at incrementality in search this year, she said. That was a build on display and video. And now we are trying to bring incrementality across all channels, offsite and then light up in stores as well.

Cook also noted that the ad stack itself was the product of 18 months of cross-functional work with business teams, product engineering, store operators, merchandising, enterprise marketing, and Walmart’s store of the future team. The measurement work and the product development are part of the same effort.

Why this matters for suppliers: Measurement has been the legitimate barrier to in-store investment for most brands. Without the ability to connect an in-store screen impression to a purchase, the investment conversation becomes a faith-based argument rather than a data-driven one. That argument rarely wins budget. What Barmish and Cook laid out is the infrastructure being built to close that gap, extending the same incrementality methodology that now exists for search, display, and video into in-store formats. Barmish was clear that incrementality in stores is still being built. Suppliers who engage with the measurement tools now, even in their current form, will have baseline data and optimization experience that will compound as the tools improve.

What both leaders said about how to do it well

Cook named the failure mode up front. I see a lot of people run towards the super shiny, she said. She was talking about brands that pay to put screens up in ten stores and take a picture and put it on LinkedIn. It looks great, but you are not going to be able to move the needle or scale it.

Her advice was to start with business objectives. Now that we have this awesome measurement suite and we understand truly what all of these different ad products do, she said, we can be hyper localized in how we are building out these omni channel marketing plans.

Barmish raised the related problem from the brand side. The thing she sees trip people up is that the agency wants one ROI model, the head of sales wants their sales lift off of end caps, and the different groups never align on what they are actually trying to do. Sitting down from the get-go and really aligning as a full omni channel team around the true business objective sounds simple, she said, but it is amazing how much that can help drive real results.

Cook closed with a candid point. There is not a playbook on how to do this at the world’s largest omni channel retailer, she said. We are all kind of as an industry figuring it out together.

Barmish agreed. We want brands to lean in with us, she said. Lean in and be flexible and want to pilot and pivot and lead with intentionality.

Why this matters for suppliers: Cook and Barmish are making the same point from different angles: start with a specific business problem, not a format. Cook’s “super shiny” warning is about brands that invest in in-store media without the measurement infrastructure or scale to learn anything from it. Barmish’s alignment warning is about brands whose internal teams show up with competing objectives and no shared definition of success. A brand that arrives with a clear objective, a willingness to pilot, and internal alignment gives the Walmart Connect in-store team something to build against. Without those, the team builds whatever fits the format, and the activation looks good in a store visit without proving anything.

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