Walmart Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Of course. Yeah, happy to. I joined the company about 4 years ago after a fairly long career in online advertising and a couple of stops between Amazon and Instacart. I am the General Manager of Walmart Connect, which means I run the business without product and technology. Those roll up to global leaders. I started in sales at Walmart Connect and moved into the GM role about 8 or 9 months ago.

Yeah. Well, it's funny, I started my career in this city 27 years ago. I just sort of pieced that together this morning as I was thinking about our chat. I've had a few experiences that really informed how I approach the business today. Many years ago, I worked at a company called Tacoda in the '05, '06 timeframe that got bought by AOL, and that was an early behavioral targeting ad network, which really informed how I thought about from the early days before DSPs, before retail media. I thought about using data to better address customers with ads. Building personas and profiles and doing things like personalization. Spent some time at NBCUniversal, where I really learned the TV business. Funny, I thought I left that behind me, and then all the retailers decided, or the largest retailers decided to get into the TV business.

I dusted off that knowledge and applied it here. Then joined Amazon in 2012, just as the ad business was getting started, and ran their DSP business for about nine years. That's been extremely helpful in my experience here at Walmart, where we have a sizable offsite business, a lot of DSP partnerships. I think that retail media is maybe a label that is less apt at describing the largest players in the retail space or the largest retailers that have advertising businesses. In part because the growth of the offsite business at a couple of these retailers, ours included. Which I'm sure we'll get into.

Of course. I'd say that over the last three or four years, we've really undertaken the publisher to platform evolution. When I started at the company, we very much behaved like a premium publisher. We offered advertisers, a small number of large advertisers, adjacency to the area and the app or the website where we were promoting holiday shopping moments, like back to school or Halloween or holiday baking or Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Selling the sponsorship offering. We also had a nascent search business at the same time. Most of the business was managed service. That is to say, we did the work for the advertiser. That's fine when you have a few hundred large brands that comprise most of your ad revenue.

As the marketplace started to take shape and we saw an opportunity to work with thousands and tens of thousands of advertisers, we knew that was the opportunity to build the performance advertising machine. The easy to buy ad platform that delivers a clear, measurable ROI, and can scale. It can accommodate any number of advertisers and is as easy to use for a small brand that might spend $1,000 a month as a large brand would want to spend $10 million a month. It works equally well. Building out a performance advertising platform, self-service, API enabled, building an ecosystem of service providers around us, is the mindset that's informed all of our decisions in the last couple of years, in terms of how we approach our partnerships with social platforms, how we're entering the CTV space.

It was really the basis for the rationale for the VIZIO acquisition, and so this platform evolution is really where we're at now.

Yeah. I just think across the retail landscape, if we just look over the last 20 years of growth and evolution in the broader digital media business, what do we see? What are the characteristics that the largest ad platforms in the U.S., and really in the world outside of China, have? They effectively reach every customer in the country in which they operate. They invest heavily in earning more and more of those customers' attention. They are easy to buy. It is as easy for a small advertiser to spend a small amount monthly as it is a big brand to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. There is a clear ROI component. They can see what they are getting for their ad investment. I think that those qualities describe a couple of the retailers in the retail media space.

One that has been around for a long time and business that is over 15 years, and us, and we are newer at this. We are about 6 years into our journey. I think that is the reason why much of the retail budgets are consumed by two companies, with one owning a disproportionate share of that revenue. I think that the rest of the retailers struggle with some aspect of that playbook, those qualities that the largest ad businesses have. Maybe they are a regional retailer and they struggle with reach, or they are specialty retail and they struggle with engagement. They do not have frequency of purchase. Maybe they are running their business on third-party technology and they are not easy to buy or struggling with proof of performance. I do not see this dynamic changing much in the near term.