Walmart Told Everyone The Plan In January 2021. Vibe Shows How Literally It Meant It

Walmart announced on June 23 that it has agreed to acquire Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform built for small and mid-sized businesses and mid-market brands. Terms were not disclosed. The transaction is subject to review under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, and the parties expect it to close by the end of Walmart’s fiscal year 2027. It was the third connected TV move Walmart Connect made in the space of two months, following the April 27 launch of the Connect Select marketplace inside Walmart DSP and the June 11 extension of Walmart Connect audiences into Google’s Display & Video 360.

Read in isolation, the Vibe agreement is one more advertising acquisition. Read against the document Walmart published on January 28, 2021, it is the latest clause of a plan the company laid out in public and then executed, year by year, in plain sight. The history is worth walking through in full, because it tells suppliers and sellers exactly what this machine was built to do and who it was built for.

2021: The Rename Was A Blueprint

On January 28, 2021, Walmart announced that Walmart Media Group would become Walmart Connect, and stated an ambition to become one of the top ten advertising platforms in the United States. The announcement named three strategic areas. First, growing ad offerings across Walmart’s own digital properties. Second, building in-store media through TV walls and self-checkout screens, a network the company described as nearly 170,000 digital screens across more than 4,500 stores. Third, and most consequentially, using Walmart’s first-party shopper data to drive media performance beyond Walmart’s own sites, anchored by a partnership with The Trade Desk to build a demand-side platform.

That DSP arrived on schedule. Walmart Connect launched Walmart DSP in August 2021, with availability for select suppliers by the end of that October, combining The Trade Desk’s inventory across display, streaming video, mobile, audio, and CTV with Walmart’s purchase data for closed-loop measurement of online and in-store sales. The same year, Walmart formed Data Ventures and launched Walmart Luminate that September, building the insights layer that would later become Scintilla. The foundation was in place before the end of the first year: audiences, attribution, and an offsite pipe.

The Growth Was Supposed To Slow. It Sped Up

Walmart disclosed its global advertising revenue for the first time in early 2022: $2.1 billion for fiscal 2022, a year in which, per the same earnings release, active U.S. advertisers using Walmart Connect grew 136%. From there the curve is fully visible in Walmart’s own filings. The global business grew nearly 30% to $2.7 billion in fiscal 2023, with Walmart Connect and Flipkart Ads doing the pulling. It grew another 28% in fiscal 2024, per Walmart’s annual report, and 27% to $4.4 billion in fiscal 2025. Then fiscal 2026, which closed this past January 31, broke the pattern: the global advertising business grew 46% to nearly $6.4 billion, per Walmart’s fourth quarter earnings release.

Sit with the shape of that curve for a moment. Three consecutive years of growth in the high twenties, and then, in the first full year with Vizio in the fold, a jump to 46%. Advertising businesses at this scale are supposed to decelerate as the base grows. Walmart’s accelerated.

The momentum carried into the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Walmart U.S. advertising grew 36%, with Walmart Connect up 44% excluding Vizio, and on the earnings call Walmart said marketplace sellers grew their advertising spend by more than 50% and saw a corresponding lift in sales. That last disclosure is the one that explains everything that follows: the cohort growing fastest is not the enterprise brand with an agency of record. It is the seller base, and Walmart has been building on-ramps for it ever since.

2024: Walmart Bought The Screens

The bet escalated in February 2024, when Walmart announced it would acquire smart TV maker Vizio for $11.50 per share, a fully diluted equity value of approximately $2.3 billion. The deal closed on December 3, 2024, making Vizio a wholly owned subsidiary reported within the Walmart U.S. segment. What Walmart bought was not a television business in any conventional sense. It was the SmartCast operating system and, per Walmart’s announcement of the close, more than 19 million active accounts, an audience that watches ad-supported streaming on hardware Walmart now owns, generating viewing data Walmart can pair with the purchase data it already held.

That same fall, Walmart Data Ventures announced that Luminate would become Scintilla, signaling the insights business’s expansion into new markets and banners. By the end of 2024, Walmart owned the shopper data, the measurement loop, the offsite pipe, and the living-room screen. Walmart reported that Vizio delivered triple-digit advertising growth in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, a sign the hardware bet was converting into media revenue.

2025 To Now: The On-Ramps Multiplied

What the stack still lacked was an easy way in for advertisers without programmatic teams. The past year has been about exactly that. In July 2025, Walmart introduced Marty, an AI super agent for sellers, suppliers, and advertisers, and by January of this year Walmart Connect had an agentic advertising assistant in beta for Sponsored Search campaigns, built to help power Marty, per Walmart Connect’s own announcement. On April 27, Walmart Connect launched Connect Select, a curated CTV marketplace inside Walmart DSP, with supply partners including Magnite, PubMatic, FreeWheel, and Index Exchange, plus Pacvue and Skai integrations so campaigns can be managed from platforms many sellers already run. On June 11, Walmart Connect brought its first-party audiences and measurement to YouTube campaigns through Display & Video 360, a capability Walmart’s own post describes as being in a closed proof of concept phase. Walmart Connect has also begun opening Vizio inventory to Yahoo DSP through Magnite, an expansion its May post places in the same pilot stage. And on June 22 at Cannes, Walmart pulled the whole apparatus under a single global commerce media vision led by Chief Growth Officer Seth Dallaire, rebranding Sam’s Club MAP as Sam’s Club Connect while keeping the three ad businesses operationally separate.

Then came Vibe. The platform offers self-serve activation, direct relationships with supply partners, and optimization tuned for performance outcomes, built for ecommerce brands and growth-stage businesses. Walmart’s announcement names the intended beneficiaries plainly: SMB and mid-market advertisers, including Walmart’s third-party marketplace sellers. Vibe CEO and co-founder Arthur Querou and CTO and co-founder Franck Tetzlaff are expected to join Walmart Connect after close. Ryan Mayward, general manager and senior vice president of Walmart Connect U.S., said in the announcement that the goal is making commerce media “more accessible, more measurable and easier to activate for advertisers of all sizes.”

The strategic logic behind the whole sequence sharpens against one external number. Amazon’s advertising revenue passed $68 billion in calendar 2025, per its fourth quarter earnings. Walmart will not close that gap by contesting enterprise television budgets that already have DSP seats and agency teams attached. The faster path is widening the base: converting sellers and mid-market brands who have never bought a TV ad into advertisers who buy one inside tools they already use. Every acquisition and launch since 2021 is legible as that play.

The Next Five Years Get Decided In The Next Budget Cycle

For 3P sellers, the practical read is patience with a purpose. Nothing changes until the Vibe transaction closes, and there is no Vibe capability to activate inside Walmart Connect today. What sellers should do now is treat the Q1 disclosure as the tell: Walmart cited a sales lift corresponding to seller ad spend growth, and it is building the streaming on-ramp because it expects that pattern to extend into television. Sellers who have never planned brand media should expect TV to surface as an option inside familiar tooling sometime after close, and the ones who benefit first will be those who arrive with clean content, competitive offers, and a view on which items deserve awareness dollars.

For 1P suppliers, the question is harder because it is an allocation question, not an adoption question. Most national brands already buy CTV somewhere. What Walmart has assembled is an argument that those dollars measure better inside its ecosystem, where Vizio exposure, YouTube reach, and purchase data connect in one reporting frame. That argument deserves scrutiny before it deserves budget. The productive questions for the next JBP or Connect planning conversation are about measurement mechanics: how exposure ties to in-store sales and not just online conversion, what incrementality methodology sits behind the lift claims, and how much campaign data a supplier can take with them. Suppliers should also watch whether the closed proofs of concept on Display & Video 360 and Yahoo DSP widen, because general availability there would change how offsite video budgets get planned against Walmart audiences.

The stakes, by Walmart’s own accounting, are no longer a side business. Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said on the first quarter call that membership and advertising combined “comprise roughly a third of our earnings today.” Walmart expects the Vibe transaction to close by the end of fiscal 2027, which is January 31 of next year. That lands the integration work squarely inside the window in which suppliers and sellers will be locking calendar 2027 media plans. The blueprint took five years to execute. The decision about what it is worth arrives with the next budget cycle.

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