Walmart Connect's sales team contacted brand clients directly before the holiday shopping season to pitch on-site brand lift studies, according to Modern Retail. Three agency executives told Digiday they received multiple outreach calls offering measurement services before finalizing holiday advertising commitments.
The retailer's team positioned lift studies as a pre-commitment diagnostic, not a post-campaign report. Brands could test creative, audience segments, or product placement effectiveness on Walmart's owned properties before committing full holiday media budgets. The pitch: measure what moves the dial on shelf, then allocate spend accordingly.
The mechanism is tactical displacement. Retail media has historically sold on reach and audience data borrowed from social playbooks. Walmart is now competing on a metric social platforms cannot directly prove: actual purchase lift in a controlled environment where the ad, the shelf, and the transaction all live under one roof. A brand running a lift study on Walmart.com sees which creative drove add-to-cart, which audience segment converted, and which product page layout lifted units sold. That closed loop makes the media buy defensible in a budget review.
Direct outreach also signals a sales motion borrowed from enterprise SaaS: solve before you sell. By offering measurement as a pre-sale service, Walmart's team positions the retailer as a testing ground, not a media vendor. The brand gets data it can use even if it doesn't book the full holiday campaign. That builds obligation and reduces the perceived risk of the spend.
For a small physical-product brand, the play is accessible at modest scale. Run your own pre-season lift test using Amazon's Brand Lift or Walmart Connect's self-serve tools if you meet minimum spend thresholds, typically $10,000 to $15,000 for a controlled test. If you're below that threshold, simulate the discipline: pick two product page layouts, two ad creatives, or two audience segments. Run them in parallel on your own site or via a Shopify A/B test for 14 days. Measure conversion rate, average order value, and repeat purchase rate. Use that data to pitch your retail buyer or justify your holiday ad spend internally. The format is the same: here's what we tested, here's what worked, here's the budget we're committing based on proof.
If you're negotiating co-op dollars or a retailer media spend, lead with the test results. Say: "We ran lift studies on two creatives. Creative A drove 18% higher conversion in the 35-50 demo. We're asking for co-op to scale Creative A in Q4." The retailer's buyer now has a number to defend internally, and you've framed the spend as a scale play, not a gamble.
The broader pattern is retail media maturing past impressions into incrementality. Walmart is teaching brands to think like performance marketers on someone else's shelf. That discipline travels.
Walmart offered lift studies before holiday ad deals, making media spend defensible with on-site purchase proof.
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