Walmart Connect this week announced the launch of Connect Select, a curated marketplace embedded within its demand-side platform that gives advertisers direct programmatic access to connected television inventory paired with Walmart's first-party shopper data. The announcement, published on April 27, 2026 by Ryan Mayward, GM and SVP of Walmart Connect, marks one of the more structurally significant moves the retail media network has made in its offsite media buildout.

The timing is deliberate. Connected TV has quietly become a meaningful performance channel for Walmart's advertising business - but one that smaller and mid-sized brands have struggled to access efficiently. Fragmented supply paths, limited transparency, and uneven data integrations have historically concentrated CTV's advantages among brands with dedicated programmatic teams and substantial media budgets. Connect Select is designed to shift that calculus.

What Connect Select actually does

Connect Select sits inside Walmart DSP as a curated inventory layer. According to the announcement, it surfaces recommended inventory optimized for reach and awareness and aligned to campaign goals, stripping out much of the complexity that makes CTV buying difficult for smaller operations. Advertisers can discover and activate deals targeting product launches, audience discovery, and brand building - without needing to navigate the full open exchange environment.

The structural logic is worth examining closely. Rather than simply pointing brands toward CTV publishers, Connect Select combines three elements: curated supply with direct paths to publishers, Walmart's first-party audience data derived from its retail transaction history, and measurement capabilities that connect CTV exposure back to actual purchase behavior at Walmart. The combination is more precise than what most programmatic CTV deals offer through open auction channels, where audience matching is typically probabilistic rather than grounded in confirmed purchase data.

According to Walmart Connect, CTV campaigns run through its platform delivered a median of 44 percent new-to-brand buyers in fiscal year 2026, based on first-party data covering February 1, 2025 through January 31, 2026, across offsite CTV campaigns. New-to-brand is defined as a customer who purchases a product of an advertised item set from Walmart's site and app as a result of an ad campaign, after not having purchased any product from that item set on Walmart's site and app for the previous 12 months. That definition is stricter than many industry equivalents, which rely on proxy signals rather than confirmed purchase records.

The supply ecosystem at launch

The inventory available through Connect Select at launch spans several categories. VIZIO is included - a notable but structurally logical inclusion given that Walmart completed the acquisition of VIZIO during fiscal year 2026. As PPC Land has tracked, VIZIO delivered triple-digit advertising revenue growth in the fourth quarter of FY26, and the company's SmartCast platform provides Walmart with automatic content recognition data from millions of connected television households, enabling audience targeting based on what those households actually watch.

Premium CTV publishers in the marketplace include Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. On the supply-side platform side, the launch partners are FreeWheel, Index Exchange, Magnite, and PubMatic - four of the largest independent SSPs in the programmatic ecosystem. Their inclusion is not cosmetic. According to the announcement, SSP partnerships enhance marketplace efficiencies through post-auction optimizations, which translates to improved performance, scale, and more competitive pricing for buyers. Deal access runs through Inventory Controls and Deal Desk within the Walmart DSP interface. The marketplace also covers omnichannel formats including online video, display, and audio, giving advertisers broader reach than CTV alone.

Magnite confirmed its role in a separate announcement published on April 28, 2026, designating itself as a Premium+ Partner in the Connect Select ecosystem. According to Magnite's announcement, the company's technology is now deeply integrated into the Walmart DSP, creating what it describes as a direct, frictionless path to premium inventory by removing unnecessary intermediaries and ensuring every impression is brand-safe, transparent, and addressable. A specific element of Magnite's contribution is the VIZIO integration: according to Magnite, the company provides the end-to-end technology stack that powers it, allowing Walmart DSP buyers to access VIZIO inventory and close the loop between ad exposure and real purchase signals.

The Magnite partnership has practical implications for targeting precision. According to the April 28 announcement, advertisers can reach households based on real purchase signals - for example, those who have recently bought a car seat at Walmart - rather than relying on broad demographic or contextual segments. This is what the industry refers to as deterministic measurement: matching against confirmed transactions rather than modeled audiences. It also enables what Magnite describes as lean-back discovery, leveraging television as a high-engagement environment where discovery and purchase can happen simultaneously.

Executive perspectives

Two executives from the supply-side partners provided on-record commentary in the Walmart Connect announcement.

Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO at PubMatic, said: "Performance in programmatic, especially in CTV, is directly tied to the quality and efficiency of supply. Our integration with Connect Select as a preferred supply partner is delivering curated, high-performing CTV inventory through direct paths, which is helping advertisers see stronger engagement, higher conversion rates, and more efficient media spend when paired with Walmart's first-party data."

Sean Buckley, President, Revenue and Market Strategy for Magnite, said: "Walmart Connect is making it easier for advertisers to bring premium streaming into their broader media strategies, and we're excited to help power that effort. By pairing Walmart Connect's curated approach with our deep footprint with the leading media companies in streaming, we're helping advertisers move beyond simple impressions to support brand building and drive real business growth on the most impactful screen in the home."

Technology partner integrations

The second strand of the April 27 announcement addresses a different operational problem: campaign management fragmentation. Running Walmart DSP campaigns has historically required working inside Walmart's own interface, separate from the tools most brands use for broader retail media management. Walmart Connect is addressing this by expanding integrations with third-party technology platforms.

At launch, the integration partners are Pacvue and Skai. According to the announcement, Pacvue will support campaign management and reporting for Walmart DSP, while Skai will provide reporting capabilities. The intent is to allow advertisers to plan, activate, and optimize full-funnel campaigns - both onsite and offsite - within a single environment, rather than switching between platforms.

Tommy Burton, VP of Global Partnerships at Pacvue, said: "When performance data is in silos, it's harder for brands to move quickly and confidently. Bringing Walmart DSP into Pacvue, alongside Walmart Onsite Display and Sponsored Search, allows advertisers to approach their Walmart investments as one connected strategy, leading to more informed decisions across Walmart's growing ecosystem and beyond."

Jeff Cohen, Chief Business Development Officer at Skai, said: "The brands getting the most out of Walmart are thinking full funnel from the start. Skai's integration of Walmart DSP reporting gives advertisers a unified view of performance across search, onsite display, and offsite media, so upper-funnel investment is no longer a leap of faith."

Both Pacvue and Skai have existing positions in the Amazon DSP ecosystem. Pacvue is listed among Amazon's ad tech activation partners, and both companies offer reporting and management tooling for Amazon campaigns - making this Walmart integration a natural extension of existing retail media management workflows rather than a new operational category for most brands already using these platforms.

Why this matters for retail media buyers

The structural importance of Connect Select sits at the intersection of two trends that PPC Land has been tracking closely. The first is the convergence of retail media and CTV. As PPC Land reported in November 2025, retail media advertising spend on connected television is projected to grow three times faster than retail media search, and IAB Europe documented that retail networks are positioning themselves as infrastructure across all media formats rather than functioning as single-channel platforms. Connect Select is a concrete implementation of that infrastructure model.

The second trend is supply path consolidation. Rather than running open-market CTV buys across fragmented exchanges, major retail media networks are building curated deal layers - closed environments where first-party data overlays are applied before the auction, and where measurement can connect ad exposure back to confirmed purchase outcomes. Best Buy selected Magnite as its exclusive SSP and curation partner in September 2025 using a structurally similar approach. Walmart's Connect Select represents a different expression of the same architecture: curated supply plus retail data plus closed-loop measurement.

What distinguishes the Walmart version is the scale of the underlying retail data. Walmart's advertising business reached $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2026, a 46% increase, with Walmart Connect growing 41% in the fourth quarter. The company serves 280 million weekly shoppers, a transaction dataset that produces audience segments grounded in confirmed purchase behavior rather than modeled intent. When that data is applied to CTV inventory through direct supply paths rather than open auction, the targeting signal arriving at the impression level is materially different from what most programmatic CTV buys can deliver.

The 44 percent new-to-brand buyer figure is particularly relevant for brands in competitive categories. Acquiring genuinely new customers through CTV - rather than reaching existing buyers who would have converted without the impression - has been a persistent measurement challenge in streaming advertising. The VIZIO acquisition gives Walmart a rare combination: automatic content recognition data from the television screen itself, layered onto a transaction database from one of the world's largest retailers, connected to CTV inventory through direct publisher relationships.

Magnite's position in this ecosystem carries additional context. The company merged its SpringServe ad server with its SSP technology in April 2025, creating a unified platform intended to streamline buyers' connection to 99% of US streaming supply. Its designation as a Premium+ Partner in Connect Select suggests a deeper technical integration than a standard SSP seat - one where Magnite's technology stack is doing work at the VIZIO layer that would not be visible to most buyers. For agencies and trading desks evaluating supply path efficiency, this distinction between a curated direct path and an open exchange bid matters for both CPM outcomes and impression quality.

For mid-sized brands in particular, the operational shift matters. Historically, CTV access through Walmart's first-party data required either a direct managed service relationship or significant internal programmatic capability. Connect Select's structure - deals surfaced inside the DSP interface, accessible through Inventory Controls and Deal Desk - reduces the activation threshold considerably. The technology partner integrations with Pacvue and Skai reduce it further, allowing brands already managing Sponsored Search and onsite display through those platforms to extend their Walmart strategy into CTV without standing up separate workflows.

The question that remains open is how the Connect Select deals are priced relative to open market CTV inventory and what floor structures govern the curated marketplace. The announcement does not disclose CPM benchmarks, minimum spend thresholds, or deal terms. Walmart Connect has historically operated primarily through managed service relationships for offsite campaigns, and the shift toward self-serve deal activation through Inventory Controls represents a structural change in how the platform distributes its supply - one whose commercial terms will shape actual adoption among the mid-market brands the announcement specifically names as a target audience.

Timeline

  • January 2021 - Walmart relaunches its media business as Walmart Connect, adding DOOH screens across more than 4,500 stores and introducing first-party data selling to DSPs
  • November 6, 2025 - IAB Europe documents retail media and CTV convergence, finding that retail media networks are positioning themselves as infrastructure across all media formats
  • February 19, 2026 - Walmart reports FY26 full-year global advertising revenue of $6.4 billion, up 46%; VIZIO segment delivers triple-digit growth in Q4; Walmart Connect hits 41% growth
  • March 2026 - VIZIO appears in Walmart Connect Ad Center's new display beta tab, signaling convergence of retail media and owned CTV inventory inside a single campaign management surface
  • April 15, 2026 - Magnite partners with AMC Global Media to bring linear TV inventory into programmatic buying through ClearLine
  • April 27, 2026 - Walmart Connect announces Connect Select, a curated CTV marketplace within Walmart DSP, with SSP partners Magnite, PubMatic, FreeWheel, and Index Exchange, and publisher partners including VIZIO, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery; technology integrations with Pacvue and Skai also announced
  • April 27, 2026 - Magnite expands AI buyer agent and SpringServe mediation with Disney and MiQ, on the same day as the Walmart Connect announcement, adding further context to Magnite's supply-side technology developments
  • April 28, 2026 - Magnite confirms its role as Premium+ Partner in Connect Select, disclosing that it provides the end-to-end technology stack powering the VIZIO integration within Walmart DSP

Summary

Who: Walmart Connect, the retail media division of Walmart Inc., announced Connect Select alongside SSP partners Magnite, PubMatic, FreeWheel, and Index Exchange, publisher partners VIZIO, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, and technology integration partners Pacvue and Skai.

What: Connect Select is a curated programmatic CTV marketplace embedded within Walmart DSP, giving advertisers direct access to premium streaming inventory combined with Walmart's first-party shopper data and closed-loop measurement. A parallel expansion of Walmart DSP integrations with Pacvue and Skai gives advertisers unified campaign management across search, onsite display, and offsite media. Walmart Connect CTV campaigns delivered a median of 44 percent new-to-brand buyers in FY26.

When: The announcement was made on April 27, 2026, by Ryan Mayward, GM and SVP of Walmart Connect. Magnite published its confirmation of the Premium+ Partner designation on April 28, 2026.

Where: Connect Select is available inside the Walmart DSP interface through Inventory Controls and Deal Desk. Campaign management and reporting through Pacvue and Skai operates within those third-party platforms.

Why: Fragmented CTV supply paths, limited transparency, and high activation complexity have historically concentrated programmatic CTV's advantages among large brands with dedicated programmatic resources. Connect Select is designed to give mid-sized and smaller advertisers structured access to curated CTV inventory tied to Walmart's first-party retail data, reducing complexity while preserving the data quality that distinguishes retail media CTV from open-market buys.

Share this article
The link has been copied!