Walmart Connect has announced partnerships with Yahoo's DSP and Magnite, allowing advertisers to activate Walmart's first-party customer data outside of Walmart's own advertising platform for the first time. The move ends years of walled-garden exclusivity and marks a significant shift in how retail media data reaches broader programmatic inventory.
Retail media that only reaches people on retail properties is a fraction of the opportunity. Walmart is choosing to follow the audience into the open web rather than waiting for the audience to come back to its properties.
Walmart Connect has announced partnerships with Yahoo's DSP and Magnite, allowing advertisers to activate Walmart's first-party customer data outside of the Walmart DSP for the first time. The move follows the end of Walmart's four-year exclusivity deal with The Trade Desk.
The partnership puts Walmart's purchase data into the hands of buyers running campaigns across Yahoo's inventory and Magnite's publisher network, which includes Vizio connected TV. Walmart's internal data shows that offsite display campaigns via Walmart Connect delivered a median of 52 percent new-to-brand customers in 2025.
This is part of a deliberate pivot by Walmart away from a closed, self-contained retail media model toward an open, flexible approach that meets advertisers where they already buy. Additional DSP partnerships beyond Yahoo and Magnite are expected.
Median share of new-to-brand customers delivered by Walmart Connect offsite display campaigns in 2025 — the data powering the Yahoo and Magnite expansion
Why it matters
For Australian advertisers, the Walmart announcement matters less as a direct buying opportunity and more as a signal about the direction of retail media globally. Australian retail media networks are building at scale — Woolworths Everyday Rewards, Coles 360 and others — and the pressure to take their data offsite will follow the same commercial logic that drove Walmart's decision.
The 52 percent new-to-brand figure is the number that will drive that conversation in Australian boardrooms. If retail media data can deliver a majority of new customers when applied to programmatic inventory beyond the retailer's own platforms, the case for keeping it inside a walled garden weakens.