Walmart's South African subsidiary has appointed Criteo to build out its onsite advertising business, adding one of Africa's largest general merchandise retailers to a network the ad tech company says now spans 235 retailers globally. The deal was announced on July 22, 2026 from Johannesburg.

Massmart Holdings Limited and Criteo disclosed a retail media collaboration on July 22, 2026, introducing Sponsored Product Ads and Onsite Display Ads across Massmart's digital properties in South Africa. According to the joint announcement, the arrangement gives brands and third-party marketplace sellers a route to reach shoppers on the retailer's owned digital surfaces.

The commercial mechanics are already partly operational. According to the announcement, the advertising solutions are live on Makro.co.za, which the companies describe as Massmart's flagship eCommerce and marketplace platform. Additional placements across the wider Massmart digital ecosystem, including Makro, remain under discussion. The companies characterise that expansion as something they are exploring in the coming months rather than a committed rollout with a fixed date, and no timetable was published.

What the deal covers technically

Two ad formats sit at the centre of the arrangement. Sponsored Product Ads occupy in-grid and search-result positions inside a retailer's own product listings, priced and ranked against shopper query and category signals. Onsite Display Ads occupy banner and placement inventory on the same properties, sold on a visibility rather than a direct-response basis. According to Criteo, Sponsored Product Ads drive sales with return on ad spend and transparent analytics, while Onsite Display Ads increase brand visibility and product exposure at key points of sale.

The underlying technology is Criteo's Commerce Yield platform. According to the announcement, Commerce Yield provides Massmart's advertisers with a unified solution to manage campaigns across the retailer's website and app. Commerce Yield is the retailer-facing half of Criteo's retail media stack, distinct from Commerce Max, the demand-side platform through which agencies and brands buy across the network. Both platforms received Media Rating Council accreditation for Onsite Sponsored Products and Onsite Display Ads in March 2024, a measurement credential that covered general invalid traffic detection.

Aidan Johnson, Vice President of Alternative Revenue at Massmart, framed the move in revenue terms. "Retail media is an important part of our growth strategy, offering brand advertisers and marketplace sellers meaningful opportunities to engage directly with a broad customer base at our digital points of sale", he said in the announcement. He added that the arrangement gives the retailer access to proven technology and global expertise, enabling it to deliver onsite advertising experiences that are valuable for brands and marketplace sellers and relevant for shoppers.

Alex Crowe, Managing Director Retail Media EMEA at Criteo, pointed to regional demand. "Retail media continues to grow globally, with particularly strong momentum in the Middle East and Africa", he said. Crowe added that the company's technology enables precise audience targeting throughout the purchase journey, along with closed-loop measurement of campaign performance that brands and their agency partners are looking for.

The marketplace seller angle

The explicit inclusion of marketplace sellers in both the announcement and Johnson's comments is not incidental. Third-party sellers on retailer marketplaces have proven a persistent monetisation gap for retail media networks, because they sit outside the managed-service relationships that networks typically build with large consumer packaged goods brands.

Criteo has been working this segment for some time. The company launched a global integration with Mirakl Ads on July 17, 2025, specifically targeting mid-to-long-tail advertisers and third-party sellers, citing SmartScout data indicating that such sellers spend 127% more than first-party brands on Amazon platforms. A marketplace platform with an active seller base is, in that framing, a different asset class from a purely first-party retail site.

Massmart's footprint and the scale question

The announcement states that Massmart comprises over 280 stores across 8 sub-Saharan countries, operating the Builders, Game, Jumbo Cash & Carry, Makro, Walmart and Shield formats, with leading shares in general merchandise, liquor, home improvement and wholesale food.

That figure sits below earlier reported store counts. Massmart operated 411 stores across South Africa and 12 other sub-Saharan countries as of October 31, 2022, according to Wikipedia's account drawing on Walmart investor relations material. The reduction over roughly four years is consistent with a period of restructuring following Walmart's move to full ownership, though neither company addressed the store count change in the announcement.

The ownership history matters for how the retail media business is likely to be run. Walmart bid for a 51% stake in Massmart in November 2010, valued at approximately R17 billion, and shareholders approved the offer of R148 per share on January 18, 2011. South Africa's Competition Tribunal cleared the acquisition in May 2011 and Walmart completed the purchase the following month. Legal challenges from government ministries and the SACCAWU labour union ran until March 2012, when the appeals court dismissed the ministerial case while acknowledging concerns about effects on small producers and employment. In August 2022, Walmart moved to acquire the remaining non-controlling shares, and the scheme closed by the end of November that year, making Massmart a wholly owned subsidiary. Walmart held 100% of the equity as at December 2025, according to the shareholder table in Walmart's annual report.

Massmart was founded in 1990 with the acquisition of six Makro stores and listed on the JSE Limited on July 4, 2000 at R12.50 per share before Walmart took it private in 2022. It is headquartered in Sandton, Gauteng.

A partnership model, not an in-house build

The structural choice here is worth isolating. Massmart is not building advertising technology internally. It is licensing a vendor platform and, per the announcement, gaining access to what it describes as proven technology and global expertise.

This is the dominant pattern among retailers entering retail media outside the largest markets. Migros took the same route in Switzerland, launching that country's first grocery retail media offering with Criteo on February 26, 2026, again covering Sponsored Product Ads at launch with Onsite Display Ads following later. The sequencing in the Massmart deal is close to identical: search-adjacent formats first, display second, expansion across additional properties deferred.

The counterexample is instructive. OTTO Advertising in Germany built its own demand-side platform and keyword targeting products, reporting 49% retail media revenue growth for fiscal year 2025/26, and accepted the engineering burden that comes with concentrating control internally. Most retailers have not made that choice. The vendor route trades margin and control for speed.

There is a parent-company dimension that the announcement does not address. Walmart operates one of the largest retail media networks in the world through Walmart Connect, whose global advertising business reached roughly $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2026 with 46% growth. Walmart Connect grew 41% in the fourth quarter of that fiscal year. Massmart's South African operation is instead running on third-party infrastructure. Neither company explained the reasoning, and the announcement makes no reference to Walmart Connect.

Criteo's position going into the deal

Criteo is adding a retailer at a point of considerable corporate uncertainty. The company reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $424.6 million, down 6%, with net income falling 79% to $8.6 million. Two retail media clients that reduced their scope of services created a $27 million headwind to contribution ex-TAC in that quarter alone, accounting for roughly 10 percentage points of drag on year-over-year growth. Excluding those two clients, the underlying retail media base grew 24%.

Against that backdrop, the network itself has kept expanding. According to Criteo's Q1 2026 investor presentation, the company serves 235 retailers, including approximately 75% of the top 30 U.S. retailers and 40% of the top 50 EMEA retailers, and 4,150 global brands. Media spend crossed $1 billion in a single quarter for the first time. The Massmart deal is a network addition rather than a revenue event, and neither company disclosed financial terms.

The client concentration problem that produced those headwinds has been visible for over a year. Criteo first disclosed in May 2025 that its largest retail media client would discontinue managed services, an event the company estimated at $25 million of negative revenue impact in the fourth quarter of 2025 and a $75 million cumulative impact across the first ten months of 2026. Fourth-quarter 2025 revenue came in at $541 million, down 2% year-over-year.

Ownership of Criteo itself is now in play. Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital submitted an offer at a premium of more than 50% to the recent share price, according to two sources familiar with the matter cited by Reuters in reporting published on July 6, 2026. Any retailer signing a multi-year technology dependency on Criteo is doing so while the vendor's ownership structure remains unresolved.

Why this matters for advertisers and agencies

Retail media has been the fastest-growing line in digital advertising for several years, and the growth differential is stark. European retail media spending grew 22.1% in 2024 against 6.1% for the overall advertising market, with Sponsored Products identified as the central driver. Omdia projects the category will capture roughly 20% of global advertising revenue by 2030, representing approximately $300 billion in annual spending.

South Africa has had no comparably scaled retail media inventory from a major domestic general merchandise retailer available through standardised international formats. For brands running category budgets across sub-Saharan Africa, campaign activation has meant either direct commercial negotiation with individual retailers or reliance on search and social. Standardised Sponsored Product Ads bought through Commerce Yield changes the operational shape of that problem, at least on Makro.co.za.

The practical constraint is fragmentation. Brands working with four to six retail media networks doubled from 10% to 24% during 2025, a diversification pattern that has driven demand for buying interfaces spanning multiple networks. Criteo has responded on that front by becoming Google's first onsite retail media partner in September 2025, allowing advertisers to manage campaigns across its retailer inventory through Search Ads 360. Whether Massmart inventory eventually becomes accessible through that route was not addressed in the announcement.

Measurement is the other open question. Crowe's reference to closed-loop measurement describes the connection between ad exposure and confirmed purchase inside the retailer's own environment. That capability is standard in mature retail media markets and is precisely what distinguishes onsite retail inventory from general display. What has not been disclosed is which measurement methodology will apply to Massmart campaigns, what attribution windows will be used, or whether third-party verification will be available to advertisers.

Unanswered questions

Several material details are absent from the announcement. No launch date was given for Onsite Display Ads, which are described as part of the offering but not confirmed as live. No traffic, shopper, or audience-size figures were disclosed for Makro.co.za or any other Massmart property, leaving advertisers without a basis to size the opportunity. No pricing model was described. No commercial terms, contract length, or revenue-sharing structure was disclosed by either party.

The store count discrepancy between the announcement's over 280 stores across 8 countries and the 411 stores across 13 countries reported for October 2022 also remains unexplained in the source material. The two figures come from different sources and different dates, and neither company addressed the gap.

Criteo describes itself as building on proprietary commerce data from more than $1 trillion in annual sales and two decades of AI development. That data asset is the argument for choosing a vendor over an in-house build. Whether it translates into measurable performance for advertisers on South African inventory is a question that will only be answered by campaign results that neither company has yet published.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Massmart Holdings Limited, the Walmart-owned South African retailer operating the Makro, Game, Builders, Jumbo Cash & Carry and Shield formats, and Criteo, the Nasdaq-listed commerce media company. Named executives are Aidan Johnson, Vice President of Alternative Revenue at Massmart, and Alex Crowe, Managing Director Retail Media EMEA at Criteo.

What: A retail media collaboration introducing Sponsored Product Ads and Onsite Display Ads across Massmart's digital properties, running on Criteo's Commerce Yield retailer monetisation platform. The formats are already available on Makro.co.za, Massmart's flagship eCommerce and marketplace platform. Expansion to additional Massmart digital properties is described as under exploration, without a stated timetable. No financial terms were disclosed.

When: Announced July 22, 2026. Sponsored Product Ads and Onsite Display Ads are described as already available on Makro.co.za, with further placements explored over the coming months.

Where: South Africa, with the announcement issued from Johannesburg. Massmart comprises over 280 stores across 8 sub-Saharan countries according to the announcement, and is headquartered in Sandton, Gauteng.

Why: Massmart positions retail media as part of its growth strategy, monetising its digital points of sale for brand advertisers and marketplace sellers. For Criteo, the deal adds a retailer in a region where the company reports strong momentum, at a point when its two largest retail media client relationships have contracted and its own ownership is subject to a takeover approach. The wider driver is a category growing at roughly four times the rate of the broader advertising market, in a market that has lacked scaled, standardised retail media inventory from a major domestic general merchandise retailer.