Walmart flexes, Criteo rewires, and the agents arrive

Walmart's Q2 FY27 results, reported August 20, put the ads business front and center: global advertising grew 38%, Walmart Connect grew 43% in the US excluding Vizio, and management raised full-year sales and operating income guidance with the ads flywheel doing much of the narrative work. The trade press spent the week treating Walmart's advertising strength as the story, not the sidebar.

It caps a summer of aggressive expansion — the Vibe.co acquisition closed August 4 to bring self-serve CTV inside Walmart Connect, ads are coming to the Sparky shopping agent, and a "Marty" advertising assistant is in beta for Sponsored Search. The read: Walmart is assembling a genuine full-funnel stack and pointing it directly at Amazon — and it now has the growth numbers to make Wall Street care.

Criteo named Amazon Ads veteran Edouard Dinichert as Chief Customer Officer and Connor McGogney as CFO — a reshuffle that lands while the company digests the loss of two anchor clients: Target's Roundel, which brought ad sales in-house sooner than expected, and Uber Eats' US business, which moved to Instacart.

The read: the independent retail media technology layer is being squeezed from both ends — retailers insourcing at the top, profitability pressure underneath. Criteo's new bench signals a pivot toward customer depth and commerce audiences; whether it can out-execute the insourcing trend is the defining question of its next four quarters.

The ANA advanced its guidelines for standardizing retail media measurement on behalf of buy-side marketers, with early feedback described as overwhelmingly positive. Days earlier, the IAB Tech Lab's Connected Commerce Summit aired "hard truths" about retail media's transparency and comparability gaps.

The read: with US retail media now a seventy-billion-dollar-plus line item, buyers are done letting every network grade its own homework. Networks that lean into standardization early can turn measurement from a defensive briefing topic into a sales asset — laggards will end up negotiating against a benchmark they didn't help write.

OpenAI switched on ChatGPT ads across 31 European markets on August 24 — six months after its US pilot — with ads limited to free tiers, visually separated from answers, and unpersonalized to satisfy GDPR. Meanwhile, new consumer research shows shoppers warming to agent-led purchases, with a majority crediting AI platforms for introducing them to brands they didn't know.

The read: conversational surfaces are becoming ad inventory faster than most RMN roadmaps assumed. For retail media, the question is no longer whether agents will mediate shopping journeys — it's whose product data, whose retail signal, and whose ad units ride along when they do.

While rivals announced agents, Amazon shipped infrastructure: the Amazon Ads MCP Server entered open beta — letting AI agents operate advertising workflows directly — and the Podcast Audience Network was folded into Amazon DSP for planning, execution, and measurement.

The read: an MCP server is a bet that the next buyer of ads is software. When the company commanding roughly $57 billion in US retail media spend makes its stack agent-operable, that choice becomes a de facto standard — every RMN's 2027 roadmap just inherited a requirement.

AdExchanger's Monday roundup — bluntly titled "Ad Tech Without Profit" — captured the sector's mounting profitability squeeze. Growth stories are no longer enough for public ad tech companies, and the pressure is bleeding into retail media's vendor layer.

The read: retail media hasn't repealed gravity. As growth rates normalize, networks and their technology partners will be judged on operating discipline, not just top-line momentum — expect consolidation conversations to accelerate into Q4.