The news: Walmart partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery—now part of Skydance—to bring shopper targeting and measurement data to linear television, the company told Business Insider.

The deal extends Walmart Connect’s retail media capabilities, which already span connected TV (CTV), into traditional broadcast inventory. Advertisers can use Walmart’s demand-side platform (DSP) to access placements on networks including TBS, TLC, and TruTV, and live sports events when available.

The bigger picture: The partnership builds on the CTV and ad tech moves Walmart has made over the past two years.

• December 2024: Walmart closed its $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio, gaining a direct pipeline into CTV viewership.
• March 2026: Walmart Connect and Vizio unveiled shoppable content with L’Oréal and a unified login across Vizio and Onn TV.
• May 2026: It partnered with Yahoo DSP and Magnite, opening its retail data to CTV buys beyond its own platform.
• June 2026: Walmart agreed to acquire self-serve CTV platform Vibe.co, extending streaming access to smaller advertisers.

Walmart is pushing into linear as the format is shrinking. Warner Bros. Discovery’s global linear ad revenues fell 12% YoY last quarter, and we expect pay TV viewership will decline 4.7% YoY to 161.6 million this year.

However, linear’s shrinking audience still includes shoppers whom CTV hasn’t fully captured, particularly older and lower-income households slower to cut cable. And the retailer has space to be experimental—we forecast that Walmart’s US retail media ad revenues will grow 31.2% YoY, ahead of eBay, Target, and Amazon.

Implications for marketers: Linear TV has lacked the closed-loop measurement that makes retail media attractive to performance buyers. Pairing Skydance’s broadcast inventory with Walmart Connect’s first-party online and in-store purchase data lets Skydance sell linear inventory against actual buying behavior instead of demographic estimates.

Walmart is following a broader pattern of retailers plugging first-party data into existing ad tech, similar to Kroger’s partnership with Roku last year and Instacart’s with The Trade Desk in 2023. For marketers, that means more places to activate shopper data, but also more platforms to compare on measurement quality.

Marketers should integrate Walmart’s purchase data with linear, CTV, and in-store placements to build an omnichannel view of each shopper, but factor the Skydance merger into multiyear commitments, since ownership changes can disrupt reporting.