Walmart Connect’s Jon Gibs on finding growth beyond ROAS

Full analysis

Walmart Connect's measurement chief, Jon Gibs, went on The Current podcast to make a straightforward pitch: stop optimizing to return on ad spend alone, and start spending for growth. His proof point is a holiday boxed wine campaign run through The Trade Desk, where shifting budget away from the highest-efficiency audience (recent buyers) toward category buyers who had never bought the brand delivered 29% of sales from new buyers and a sales lift of about 7.5%, up from 4.7% the year before.

The decision this surfaces for an operator: how much weight to put on retail media data leaving the retailer's walls to measure media everywhere else. That's easy to undo. Nobody is signing a decade-long contract off a podcast. No deadline forces anyone's hand. So the real question is narrower: is Walmart building the cross-channel measurement spine that publishers, DSPs, and clean-room vendors have to plug into, or is this one retailer talking its own book?

The Market Analyst. The content here is thin, but the pattern is loud. Walmart Connect is extending closed-loop measurement (tracking an ad exposure all the way to a purchase) off its own site, into The Trade Desk, Vizio, and Spotify. That's the retail media network trying to become a measurement currency, not just an ad seller. Plain version: Walmart wants to be the referee that decides whether your CTV and audio spend worked, using its purchase data as the scorecard. If that lands, LiveRamp, InfoSum, Habu, and the clean-room crowd win the plumbing work. The walled gardens lose a little, because advertisers get a purchase-based scorecard that isn't Meta or Amazon grading their own homework.

The Skeptic. Gibs said "all of our ad products show positive incrementality." Of course he did. He runs the unit that makes money when brands spend more, and he disclosed no holdout size, no test design, no significance threshold. The 9.3x ROAS and 7.5% lift are Walmart's own numbers from Walmart's own team, measuring Walmart shoppers buying at Walmart. The Wanamaker line, that wasted media is now obsolete, only holds inside the purchase graph Walmart can see. Boxed wine sells in grocery stores, liquor stores, and gas stations Walmart has no view into. The "no waste" claim quietly assumes the only customers who matter are the ones Walmart can already track.

The Operator. Try to act on this Tuesday morning and the friction shows up fast. The Scintilla feed sounds great until your agency asks who does the identity match, who pays for the clean room, and whether the attribution window Walmart uses matches the one your other partners use. Running one closed loop through Walmart, another through a different retailer, and a third through a walled garden means three scorecards that don't reconcile. The genuinely useful operating insight Gibs gave away for free: CTV plus search together beats either alone by a wide margin. That you can test next quarter without signing anything.

The Customer / End User. The brand buyer actually wants the thing Gibs is selling: a reason to fund new-customer acquisition instead of retargeting people who were going to buy anyway. His "most dangerous metric" callout, conversion rate with no incrementality, is correct and overdue. Retargeting existing buyers looks fantastic on a dashboard and grows nothing. But the brand also wants a scorecard it can trust across every channel, and a single retailer's purchase data can't be that. The buyer takes the growth framing and keeps shopping the measurement.

The tensions. Two real disagreements. First, the Market Analyst sees a measurement currency forming; the Skeptic sees a vendor marking its own exam with no methodology disclosed. Both are right, which is the point: the strategy is real, the proof is not independent. Second, the Customer wants Walmart's purchase data because it's better than panels, but wants it validated by someone who doesn't profit from the answer. That gap, between Walmart wanting to be the referee and buyers wanting a referee they didn't hire, is where this actually gets decided.

Synthesis. This hinges on one belief: will advertisers accept a retailer's first-party purchase data as cross-channel truth, or will they insist that an independent party grade it? The council leans toward "insist." Buyers have spent two years refusing to let sellers grade their own homework in the walled gardens, and they will not hand that job to Walmart either, however good the data is. The growth-over-efficiency argument is sound and worth acting on now. The closed-loop-everywhere pitch is a land grab for the measurement layer, and it runs straight into the buy side's refusal to trust a scorekeeper with a sales quota. Before committing real budget to Walmart's off-platform measurement, make Walmart run a holdout test you design, or route the match through a neutral clean room you control.

Prediction: No top-10 US advertiser or holding company will adopt Walmart Connect's closed-loop measurement as its accepted cross-channel currency for off-Walmart media (CTV, audio, social) by the 2027 upfront negotiations in May and June 2027; demand will instead route through independent or clean-room validation.

Confidence: Medium. The buy-side refusal pattern is strong, but Walmart's data quality could move a single big brand faster than expected.

Why: Gibs is pitching Walmart's own purchase data, measured by Walmart's own team, as the scorecard for media bought on Vizio, Spotify, and The Trade Desk, and he disclosed no holdout design or independent audit. That is the same conflict buyers have spent two years rejecting inside Meta and Amazon: they will not let the entity selling the media also certify that it worked. The mechanism that blocks adoption is procurement, not technology. Agency measurement leads now write independent incrementality testing into contracts as a baseline, so Walmart's feed gets used as an input to a neutral clean room rather than accepted as currency on its own. The opposite outcome, a major holdco blessing Walmart's numbers as cross-channel truth, would require the buy side to reverse a stance it has held firmly against far larger platforms, which is the less likely path.

Revisit by 2027-06-30: We're right if, through the 2027 upfronts, no top-10 advertiser or major holding company publicly accepts Walmart Connect's measurement as cross-channel currency and the off-platform data continues to flow through independent or clean-room validation. We're wrong if a top-10 advertiser or holding company names Walmart Connect's closed-loop measurement as its accepted currency for off-Walmart CTV, audio, or social spend.