Walmart Connect pitches brands directly as it pushes lift studies ahead of holiday ad deals

Stella Rising, a digital media and marketing agency, is among them. Instead, advertisers are concerned whether Walmart’s study can answer one of retail media’s most debated questions: “Did this RMN campaign drive incremental sales or did the retailer take credit for a purchase that would have happened anyway?”

Lagging standardization across platforms, walled-garden data and difficulty proving incrementality has left marketers with individual hodge-podge approaches to their retail media investments. Walmart’s study proves it’s competing to dominate not just media budgets, but conversations around measurement. That conversation matters a lot more in Q4, when CFOs and CMOs ask harder questions about return on investment, said Lacie Edgeman, co-owner and managing director at PrograMetrix ad agency.

“From our experience, Q4 is when advertisers are least willing to fund spend they cannot defend,” Edgeman said in an emailed statement to Digiday. She added, “Walmart is signaling that it wants to be evaluated as a full-funnel partner (awareness, consideration, intent), not only as a lower-funnel conversion engine.”

The lift studies are offering brands specific insights into how their Walmart spend is performing and Walmart gets to brandish its measurement capabilities. 

“Done well, they’re a win for both sides,” said a Stella Rising spokesperson in an emailed statement to Digiday.

The studies were offered on the basis of how much an advertiser spent via Walmart Connect, according to Anthony Costanzo, chief analytics officer at Mile Marker. At least four of Mile Marker’s clients are participating in the study. Costanzo did not name clients or detail client spend figures.

It’s not unusual for retailers to offer tests and other features directly to advertisers. Walmart specifically has offered one-off beta tests and other offerings to larger advertisers, “but we’re starting to see this conversation trickle down to more and more accounts,” said Costanzo.

Walmart’s move comes at a pivotal time given brands are locking in Q4 spending and finalizing 2027 media budgets. In August, Walmart reported its global ad business was up 38% for the second quarter of the year. It’s one of the fastest-growing RMNs, per eMarketer. If Walmart can prove its RMN was the cause of a sale, the RMN stands to unlock greater ad spend (and step further out of Amazon’s shadow).

“That could be an interesting point of differentiation, an interesting attack angle for them to take on Amazon to win more media dollars — is [to] offer that incrementality capability to justify the investment,” said one agency exec who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Advertisers are spending more on retail media, expected to shell out $69.33 billion on retail media before the year closes out, according to eMarketer. As spend grows, so too does scrutiny around return on investment.

Incrementality tests can be helpful, but come with trade-offs. The brand lift study can be costly, based on spend requirements, and time consuming. It can take up to nine weeks after a campaign ends for reporting to trickle in, Edgeman told Digiday.

Advertisers still lack direct access to independently set up and execute the studies, leaving retailers like Walmart often grading their own homework, Costanzo said.

“We’re still not able to execute the kinds of incrementality tests we’d like to, that we could do in a non-walled garden,” he said. Costanzo added, “but it’s a step in the right direction, and we do expect other retailers to move in that direction alongside Walmart.”