Walmart Connect is expanding its audience data offering into YouTube streaming inventory through Display & Video 360, allowing advertisers to target Walmart audiences more precisely while tying campaigns back to shopping behavior and sales outcomes.

The addition of YouTube also broadens Walmart Connect's video footprint beyond its owned properties, including VIZIO, giving advertisers another way to use Walmart audience data across connected TV (CTV) and streaming environments.

The YouTube integration is part of Walmart Connect's broader push to make its audience data available beyond Walmart-owned channels. In May, the company announced advertisers could apply Walmart's first-party data when purchasing inventory through platforms such as Yahoo DSP.

The strategy reflects a larger trend across retail media, as networks look to extend shopper data into the broader open web and CTV ecosystem.

• Walmart Connect’s share of off-site retail media ad spending is 20.7 percentage points lower than non-Amazon retail media networks, according to EMARKETER forecast data, making audience expansion and broader distribution increasingly important as competition intensifies.
• In addition, Walmart said that 52% of purchasers attributed to the median Walmart Connect off-site display campaign in 2025 were new-to-brand customers, suggesting off-site campaigns can play a role in customer acquisition as well as conversion.

"As these audiences become more accessible across programmatic environments, more clients can activate and scale against them in ways that fit their existing workflows, especially given they are built on real purchase data rather than modeled signals," Joel Lunenfeld, global CEO of Publicis Media Exchange (PMX), said in a statement.

Why YouTube: The move also aligns Walmart Connect more closely with where marketers are directing ad budgets.

• Some 72% of US senior decision-makers expect YouTube investment to increase this year, according to January data from Haus.
• The same data found the platform also ranks highly on measurement and ROI confidence, with 57% of decision-makers saying they are confident defending YouTube's performance from a measurement standpoint.

Beyond advertising, YouTube is playing a growing role in influencing purchases. Nearly three-quarters (74.8%) of Gen Z consumers and 65.8% of millennials said creator or influencer content on YouTube influenced a purchase decision, found December 2025 data from Skai and Pollfish.

"With viewers watching an average of 110 million hours of shopping content on YouTube every day, the reach of the platform and potential for engagement is undeniable," said Courtney Rose, vice president of retail at Google, in a statement.

The partnership may also help Walmart position its audience data in a media environment increasingly shaped by AI-powered discovery, as 71% of US content marketers view YouTube as a top platform for reaching audiences through large language models, according to January 2026 data from Clutch and Conductor.

“Generative chatbots like ChatGPT, like Gemini, they really like using social content,” said our analyst Max Willens on a “Behind the Numbers” episode, citing Similarweb data that found YouTube was the top recipient of AI chatbot referral traffic in May 2025.

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