Sam’s Club MAP Just Made the Walmart Connect Comparison Harder to Duck

Sam’s Club announced on April 23 that its Member Access Platform is expanding its in-club channel with three additions: enhanced Omni Experiences, In-Club Audio Ads delivered through Sam’s Club Radio, and Fuel Screen Ads at the more than 500 fuel stations the club operates. The Omni slate brings back Race to the Club with Andretti Global, which Sam’s Club says drove a 24% sales lift for featured items last year, and adds two new programs: Win Summer with Sam’s Club and Sam’s Football Club. The announcement lands one week after MAP’s April 16 update on Rest of Market analysis and its deeper measurement stack. The two releases should be read together.

Read separately, April 23 is a format announcement. Read together with April 16, it is the build-out of a parallel in-store media system to Walmart Connect, with a different measurement foundation underneath it.

The Surface Comparison Is Misleading

Walmart Connect began testing ads on the Walmart Radio Network in 2023 and, as of early 2024, ran ads across roughly 170,000 digital screens in more than 4,600 U.S. stores, according to Talk Business. Both footprints have expanded since. Sam’s Club MAP is now offering Sam’s Club Radio as an ad-supported channel, hosted weekday by DJ Chris Bobbitt across clubs nationwide, and adding fuel-pump screen ads at 500-plus locations. A supplier looking at the two decks side by side would see the same four format types, audio, digital screens, fuel pumps, and sampling and demos, with Walmart Connect carrying many times the store count.

That scale gap is real. It is also not the relevant comparison.

Walmart Connect’s in-store formats reach a mass audience of Walmart shoppers, most of whom are not logged in to anything. The network has built meaningful targeting around the Walmart app and Walmart+ data, but a shopper standing in front of a Deli screen at a Supercenter is, for measurement purposes, mostly anonymous until they transact with a loyalty signal. Sam’s Club operates on a different foundation. Every person inside a club has presented a membership ID at the door. Every transaction closes the loop back to that ID. Sam’s Club Radio and a fuel-pump screen at a Sam’s station are reaching an audience that is identifiable at the impression level.

Harvey Ma, vice president and general manager of Sam’s Club MAP, put the logic in the April 16 release: MAP’s purpose is to use more than 40 years of first-party deterministic membership data to produce business outcomes for advertisers. The April 23 formats inherit that foundation. A radio spot running in Sam’s Club Radio carries a closed-loop tie to sales receipts at the individual member level that the same spot on Walmart Radio Network, reaching a broader but largely anonymous store audience, cannot match.

The Two Networks Are Now Disclosing Incrementality, But for Different Planning Questions

Both Walmart Connect and Sam’s Club MAP are now publishing incremental ROAS figures validated against Circana panels, which is itself a meaningful shift in the retail media category. The distinction matters for how a supplier should read each number.

Walmart Connect, at CES 2026, reported that its campaigns deliver 2.8x stronger incremental ROAS and 2x higher sales lift than Circana digital media benchmarks in key categories. That figure answers a comparative question: how does spending on Walmart Connect perform against spending in other digital environments?

MAP’s April 16 Rest of Market analysis answers a different question. Using Circana’s multi-outlet loyalty panel of more than 500 million cards, MAP measures how its campaigns influence sales beyond Sam’s Club at other retailers. Sam’s Club reports that campaigns using MAP ROM show a median 17% lift in iROAS compared with measuring Sam’s Club performance alone. That figure is about cross-retailer halo, specifically how much of MAP-driven sales are showing up at non-Sam’s stores.

For a supplier, the two disclosures serve different planning needs. Walmart Connect’s number helps answer whether retail media dollars beat social media dollars in a direct comparison. MAP’s number helps answer a harder question, which is how much of a Sam’s Club campaign is pulling up total-brand sales at other retailers. A supplier whose Sam’s Club SKU also lives on shelves at Walmart, Costco, and Kroger is going to care more about the cross-retailer halo than the platform-versus-platform benchmark.

The historical frame in the planning meeting has been: how much of my trade and media budget goes to Walmart Connect, given its scale and my Walmart.com velocity? The frame MAP is now adding on top of that: how much of my Sam’s Club media should be treated as a lever on total-brand incrementality rather than a channel-specific spend?

The Omni Experiences Slate Is Not a Shopper-Marketing Buy

The Andretti Global program, now in its second season, sits in a different category from the audio and fuel-screen formats. A 24% sales lift on featured items is a real number, but the program’s strategic value is not the lift. It is the positioning of MAP as something brands partner with on cultural activations, not just something they buy impressions from. Jill Gregory, global president of Andretti, described the collaboration in the release as a strategic platform for consumer brands to connect with fans and drive new customer growth. That is sponsorship language, not retail media language.

The timing of the April 23 announcement is worth noting for brand teams. Kyle Kirkwood, who drives the No. 27 Andretti Global Honda that Sam’s Club sponsors, entered the April 19 Long Beach race leading the 2026 INDYCAR points standings after winning the Java House Grand Prix of Arlington in March, according to INDYCAR coverage. Sam’s Club is expanding its INDYCAR partnership at a moment when the car it backs is carrying a points-leading driver into one of the series’ marquee events. That context is unusual for a retail media announcement and suggests the program is being run as a brand-sponsorship asset, not a vendor-funded display buy.

Win Summer with Sam’s Club and Sam’s Football Club follow the same logic. Suppliers whose categories intersect with these tentpoles, such as grills, beverages, snacks, and consumer electronics, are being offered the equivalent of a brand-sponsorship slot with a retail-media measurement tail. That is a category Walmart Connect has started to develop through event-tied campaigns but has not yet built into a programmatic slate of its own branded properties.

The implication for brand teams is that MAP’s Omni Experiences should probably be evaluated against a brand-sponsorship budget line, not a shopper-marketing line. The ROI conversation is different. The audience is different. The creative standard is different. Treating Race to the Club as a shopper-marketing spend and measuring it on a one-quarter sell-through basis will understate what the investment is actually doing, and it will put MAP in the wrong column on the allocation spreadsheet.

MAP Sits Outside the 1P and 3P Split That Structures Walmart Connect Conversations

Sam’s Club does not operate a third-party Marketplace on Walmart.com’s model, so the 1P and 3P split that structures most Walmart Connect conversations does not apply here in the same way. MAP is, effectively, a first-party supplier channel. The relevant segmentation at Sam’s Club runs elsewhere. It is between suppliers whose Sam’s Club business is incremental to their Walmart business, often with a different SKU, a different club pack, and a different margin profile, and suppliers whose Sam’s Club business is a smaller extension of their Walmart presence.

The first group, suppliers with distinct Sam’s Club P&Ls, has the clearer case to fund MAP against its own measurement. The second group faces a harder allocation decision, because MAP dollars are pulled from the same pool that funds Walmart Connect, and the two networks are answering different questions with their respective disclosures. A combined Walmart and Sam’s Club plan that treats MAP as a proportional slice of the Walmart Connect buy is not using either network’s measurement correctly.

Company-Disclosed Numbers Are Only Useful If Suppliers Know What to Ask About Them

The 24% sales lift on Race to the Club featured items, the 17% median iROAS lift on MAP ROM, the 4x sales lift that GhostBed reported from MAP’s Expert Review Videos, and Walmart Connect’s 2.8x iROAS versus Circana digital benchmarks are all company-disclosed figures. They are not audited, and the methodologies are not standardized across the retail media industry. The value suppliers should extract from them is directional. Ask the MAP team for category-specific benchmarks before the next JBP, and ask for the specific methodology behind the ROM figure. Ask Walmart Connect the same kinds of questions about the benchmark set it compared against. The quality of the answers will tell a supplier how mature each network’s measurement stack actually is and which network’s disclosure is more useful for the specific planning decision on the table.

The broader signal is that the retail media category is entering a phase where networks are competing on the specificity of their incrementality disclosures, not just the existence of them. Sam’s Club MAP and Walmart Connect are both moving in that direction, with different emphases. Suppliers who read April 23 as a format refresh rather than a signal about how retail media networks are now differentiating themselves on measurement will be making the allocation call with the wrong framework.

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