PepsiCo Used Walmart Connect to De-Risk a Launch. Most Suppliers Couldn’t Have, Until This Quarter.

At POSSIBLE in Miami Beach this week, PepsiCo Beverages North America CMO Mark Kirkham told an audience that he does not like the term retail media network. Speaking alongside Kyle McWhirter, group director and head of food at Walmart Connect, Kirkham described Walmart Connect as a shopper engagement network that reshaped how PepsiCo launched its prebiotic cola following the company’s $1.95 billion acquisition of Poppi, which closed in May 2025. The product first went live through a Black Friday e-commerce test with Walmart and other partners and sold out in under 24 hours. The data from that test fed into the broader retail rollout in February.

In a Walmart Connect article published April 28, McWhirter wrote that PepsiCo entered the launch with a clear audience hypothesis built around a narrow, health-focused segment, but Walmart Connect’s first-party data showed the strongest response coming from everyday cola shoppers and lapsed category buyers. PepsiCo responded by leaning messaging into taste to expand appeal while reinforcing functional benefits closer to conversion, and developing creative in-house with dynamic creative variation by audience. Per Walmart Connect first-party campaign data covering Pepsi Prebiotic from November 21, 2025 forward, single-serve velocity outperformed the category, eCommerce drove roughly one-third of the mix, and the campaign delivered more than 150 million national impressions.

It is being read in CPG circles as a blueprint. The harder question is which suppliers can actually run this playbook, and what Walmart’s own platform releases through Q1 are doing to widen the door.

The case is more specific than the headline suggests

The PepsiCo example worked because Pepsi had capabilities most suppliers do not have. Pepsi developed creative assets in-house, ran dynamic creative variation by audience, integrated Walmart shopper signals into national programs across other retailers, and had a category leadership team in place to act on what the early test produced. McWhirter, in the same session, said the program shifted measurement away from impressions, CPMs, and ROAS toward business outcomes such as velocity and household penetration.

That outcome-based measurement posture is real, and Walmart Connect has been building toward it on the platform side. But Pepsi’s ability to translate the signals into faster decisions came from internal speed, not from anything Walmart provided to them exclusively. A mid-sized supplier without an in-house creative team, without dynamic creative infrastructure, and without an analytical bench to fold Walmart shopper data into broader retail strategy is not running this playbook in 2026, regardless of how much Connect spend they have authorized.

Walmart spent Q1 closing the gap between PepsiCo’s playbook and everyone else’s

The more useful framing for most readers is that Walmart Connect and Walmart Data Ventures have spent the first quarter of fiscal 2027 systematically lowering the operating cost of doing what PepsiCo did. Four releases matter, and one of them dropped this week.

On April 28, Walmart Data Ventures introduced Scintilla Media Data Feed, an API that allows advertisers to securely share approximately 500 Walmart first-party operational and retail data elements, including digital transactability, item attributes, and omni sales, with their agency and technology partners. Walmart Connect framed it as the next step after the 2024 launch of Scintilla Insights Activation, designed to bring retail signals directly into the platforms advertisers already use to plan, optimize, and measure media. The published case study described a CPG brand using Scintilla data to identify share loss to a competitor in specific ZIP codes and activating a geo-targeted offsite Walmart DSP campaign that delivered a 2.97% sales lift across targeted markets and a 72% win-back rate among returning buyers, per Walmart first-party data from October to December 2025. This is the single platform piece that most directly maps to what Pepsi described doing with internal infrastructure.

The day before, on April 27, Walmart Connect launched Connect Select, a curated marketplace within Walmart DSP that surfaces recommended CTV inventory aligned to specific campaign goals including product launches, with VIZIO, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery inventory at launch. Walmart Connect reported that CTV campaigns delivered a median of 44 percent new-to-brand buyers in FY26 per Walmart first-party data, a metric that maps closely to what suppliers actually want from a launch-media buy. The same announcement expanded technology-partner integrations to include Pacvue for campaign management and reporting and Skai for reporting, allowing advertisers to plan and optimize Walmart DSP, onsite display, and sponsored search in a single environment.

Walmart Connect also expanded self-serve social inside the Ad Center, with self-serve access to Meta available now and TikTok rolling out later this half. For a mid-sized supplier, this is the difference between social being an offsite tactic that requires separate measurement reconciliation and social being a Walmart-attributed channel inside the same dashboard as Sponsored Search and Display.

And Marty, the agentic advertising assistant introduced at CES 2026, is now in beta for sponsored search and is designed to handle plain-language guidance on bidding, keywords, and campaign optimization. Walmart Connect reported that 97% of advertiser queries to Marty have been unique, suggesting the assistant is being used for specific campaign troubleshooting rather than reference lookups. None of this turns a Marketplace seller into PepsiCo. The cumulative effect is that the floor of what a single in-house category manager can run, with sound data and reasonable speed, is higher than it was twelve months ago.

1P and 3P see different doors into the same room

The implications diverge meaningfully by channel. For 1P suppliers with Bentonville teams, the PepsiCo case validates pushing for joint planning conversations with Walmart Connect that are tied to specific innovation calendars rather than general advertising budgets. Suppliers with new items launching in the second half of 2026 should be testing the Black Friday e-commerce window as a pre-launch read on creative and pricing architecture, not as an opportunistic sales event. Scintilla Media Data Feed, in particular, gives 1P suppliers a way to bring Walmart retail signals directly into agency planning workflows, which is what made Pepsi’s signal-to-action loop possible in the first place.

For 3P Marketplace sellers, the relevant lever is different. Sellers do not get joint planning sessions with Walmart Connect leadership, and the PepsiCo case is harder to translate directly. What sellers do get, primarily through the Walmart Connect Ad Center, is access to Sponsored Search, Onsite Display for brand-registered sellers, Sponsored Brands, Brand Shop and Shelf, and the same closed-loop measurement that ties exposure to online and in-store sales. Speaking to Prosper Pathway in February, Walmart Connect senior director of growth marketing Adem Sengul positioned expanded self-serve tools and AI-powered features as the way sellers move without large teams or specialized expertise. Sellers running new SKUs into Q4 2026 should be modeling Connect Select and self-serve social into their launch math now, while pricing and inventory contention is lower, rather than arriving in October to a saturated bid environment.

What this quarter changes that last quarter did not

The PepsiCo case is the cleaner version of an argument Walmart Connect has been making for several quarters: that retail media works better as launch intelligence than as lower-funnel conversion. What is new is not the argument. What is new is that the platform now contains the pieces a supplier needs to act on it without PepsiCo’s internal infrastructure.

A year ago, a supplier wanting to run this playbook needed an in-house creative team for dynamic variation, a custom data pipeline to push Walmart shopper signals into agency planning tools, and a CTV buying capability that could clear inventory at launch speed. Walmart Connect’s Q1 releases address each of those. Scintilla Media Data Feed handles the data pipeline. Connect Select handles the CTV access. The Pacvue and Skai integrations handle the agency activation layer. Marty, in beta, addresses the smaller advertiser without a media team. None of these alone would matter. Released within the same fiscal quarter, they map onto the capability set the PepsiCo case required. Walmart’s Q4 FY26 earnings release reported global advertising up 37% in Q4 including VIZIO and Walmart Connect U.S. up 41% in the quarter, with full-year global advertising up 46% to $6.4 billion. That growth is the commercial backdrop against which the Q1 releases were rolled out.

The suppliers reading the PepsiCo case as a blueprint should be reading the Q1 releases as the reason the blueprint is suddenly useful to them.

Winning With Walmart

Winning With Walmart is an independent platform for suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts.

Articles are developed by staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners.

Some are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools and are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by Winning With Walmart editors before publication.

Editorial judgment, sourcing decisions, and final approval rest with the publication's human editors in every case.

We are committed to accuracy and fairness. If you believe this article contains an error, we welcome your feedback.