Walmart’s Creator Program Just Became a Media Channel Marketplace Sellers Control

At the Association of National Advertisers’ Media Conference on March 25, Sarah Henry, Walmart’s head of content, influencer and commerce, described the Walmart Creator program as having “exploded in terms of creator growth, creator demand and the value that creators are finding out of this.” The program launched in beta in 2022. Since then it has added creator tools, a tiered bonus structure, and, most recently, a self-serve collaboration function that connects Marketplace sellers directly with creators inside the platform.

Creator Collabs Is a Seller-Initiated Tool, Not a Campaign Application

Per Walmart’s November 2025 announcement, Creator Collabs is automated and self-serve. Marketplace sellers find creators inside the platform, set their own advertising and commission rates, and fund brand partnerships directly. Creators enrolled in Walmart Creator see those offers and accept them without any intermediary step. This is not a pitch to Walmart’s influencer team. Sellers set the terms and initiate the relationship themselves.

That separates Collabs from every other advertising surface Walmart offers. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands run through Walmart Connect’s auction, where Walmart sets the rules, the format, and the floor. Collabs operates on a commission-per-sale model that sellers fund and structure on their own terms. Whether Walmart eventually integrates Collabs into Connect’s broader auction infrastructure is not something the company has stated. For now, the two channels sit apart in both mechanics and cost structure, and the difference matters for how sellers should budget and evaluate each.

For 1P suppliers, this channel works differently. Brand deals through Walmart Creator are brokered through Walmart’s commercial marketing organization, and the broader influencer strategy, including the “Walmart. Who Knew?” campaign that launched in 2025, is driven by Walmart, not by supplier initiative. The self-serve Collabs function is a 3P tool. First-party suppliers do not have the same direct lever.

Sorting Creators by Follower Count Will Cost You on Commission

Henry was direct about how Walmart thinks about creator selection: audience size is no longer the primary signal. TikTok and Meta’s algorithms now reward intentional engagement, specifically replays, saves, and shares, not reach. Walmart builds its creator strategy around what consumers are actually searching for on social platforms, then commissions content that answers those specific queries.

This changes the math for sellers setting commission rates inside Collabs. The most expensive creators in any category are not necessarily producing the most attributable sales at Walmart. A creator with 40,000 highly engaged followers in kitchen organization or pet nutrition may convert more consistently than a lifestyle creator with ten times the reach and a diffuse audience. Sellers who sort by follower count are optimizing for the metric Walmart’s own marketing team has moved away from. The more productive filter is content specificity and category engagement depth, neither of which follower counts reveal, and both of which surface clearly once a seller has run even a small number of Collabs campaigns and can compare results directly.

Last-Click Attribution Will Make This Channel Look Worse Than It Is

Henry was candid at the ANA conference that Walmart does not yet have a single measurement standard for creator performance. The company currently uses a combination of last-click digital models, which capture in-app and website sales, and traditional media mix models designed to solve for incrementality. She described the goal as a metric that “holds as much water as something like transactional and customer value does” and framed it as an unresolved industry problem.

Commission-based attribution captures the purchase that flows through a creator’s affiliate link and misses the one where a consumer watched the video, closed the app, and completed the purchase in the Walmart app two days later. Comparing Collabs to Sponsored Products on a last-click basis will understate what the channel is doing. Walmart’s own marketing team uses media mix modeling precisely because last-click understates creator contribution to purchase intent. The measurement infrastructure to close that gap does not yet exist, and Henry said so plainly at the ANA conference. Sellers should build their Collabs budgets with that reality already priced in.

The Case for Moving Before Connect Auction Competition Arrives Here Too

Walmart Connect generated $6.4 billion in global ad revenue in calendar 2025, a 41% domestic increase, per Walmart’s February 2026 earnings. CFO John David Rainey told investors that advertising and membership income represented fully a third of profit in the most recent quarter, and that third-party Marketplace sellers are a faster-growing segment of the Connect ad business than first-party brands. Auction competition inside Connect is intensifying as seller ad budgets grow alongside it.

Collabs sits outside that auction. Its commission-based structure scales with performance rather than with bid pressure, and the pool of sellers actively using it has not reached the saturation that characterizes mature Sponsored Products categories. Sellers who build campaign history inside Collabs now will know which creators convert in their category, at what commission rate, and in what content format before that knowledge is widely held. Walmart’s February 2026 earnings made clear that third-party seller ad spending is the fastest-growing segment of Connect’s business, and that growth is moving overwhelmingly into auction-based formats. Collabs is the one surface in the Walmart advertising ecosystem where the auction has not arrived yet.

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