Walmart flexes, Criteo rewires, and the agents arrive

Walmart has spent the last few years building the plumbing; now it is turning on the faucets. Advertising up 38% — Walmart Connect up 43% in the US excluding Vizio — with full-year guidance raised on the strength of the flywheel is the proof the strategy is working, and Wall Street treating ads as core to the margin story is what makes it durable.

The second-order shift is who the buyer becomes. If the agentic layer matures the way this quarter hints, the next battleground gets fought by software, not just media plans — and the brands that pressure-test Walmart Connect the way they do Amazon (search, CTV, measurement, agentic interfaces) will be the ones positioned when it does. Watch how fast Walmart stitches self-serve, CTV and AI-assisted buying into one motion; that is the tell for whether the faucets keep opening.

Criteo's challenge is existential but not unique: the ad-tech layer that rode the retail media wave now has to prove it can add value that retailers cannot build themselves. Losing Roundel to insourcing and Uber Eats' US business to Instacart while installing an Amazon Ads veteran as chief customer officer says the company knows exactly which fight it is in.

The squeeze comes from both ends — retailers insourcing at the top, profitability pressure underneath — which means scale alone defends nothing; service depth, measurement and unique data are what keep the business. For advertisers this is a renegotiation window and a reason to diversify retail media partners. The next four quarters will tell whether Criteo is a platform or a placeholder — watch client retention, not the org chart.

Measurement has been retail media's weakest link for years, and this is the week the referees finally moved: the ANA advancing buy-side standardization guidelines to overwhelmingly positive feedback, days after the IAB summit aired the transparency gaps in public. With US retail media now a seventy-billion-dollar-plus line item, buyers are done letting every network grade its own homework.

Standards do not solve measurement overnight, but they change the conversation from 'trust us' to 'prove it' — and that favors the networks with real performance, not just reach. The smart posture is to lean into standardization early and turn measurement from a defensive briefing topic into a sales asset; brands, meanwhile, should start asking every partner the same questions and demanding comparable metrics. Watch who volunteers for the standards work and who stalls — that split is the next competitive map.

This is the shift that retail media has been circling for two years, now with a hard date on it: ChatGPT ads live across 31 European markets six months after the US pilot, while consumers tell researchers that AI platforms are already introducing them to brands they did not know. Conversational surfaces became ad inventory faster than most roadmaps assumed.

Agents do not browse websites; they retrieve answers — so if your commerce data is not structured for an agent to understand and cite, you are not in the consideration set, whatever your media plan says. The next buyer of ads may be software, and the units that ride along will look nothing like display and search. First movers get to define the formats and signals agents use to recommend products; watch how product data, offers and content start showing up inside agents, because those early experiments are where the defaults get written.

While everyone else talked about agents, Amazon shipped the API: an MCP server in open beta that lets AI agents operate advertising workflows directly, plus podcast inventory folded into the DSP for planning, execution and measurement. That pattern — quietly building infrastructure while the market debates strategy — is why Amazon still defines the retail media rhythm.

At roughly $57 billion in US retail media spend, Amazon's infrastructure choices become de facto standards, which means every RMN's 2027 roadmap just inherited a requirement it did not write. The skill shift lands on buyers too: campaign creation, optimization and reporting orchestrated by AI moves the craft from manual buying to prompt engineering and outcome governance. Watch adoption of the agent-operable stack — the moment agencies default to it, agent-operability stops being differentiation and becomes the entry fee.

The easy growth era of retail media is closing. 'Ad Tech Without Profit' is a blunt headline, but the market's judgment underneath it is blunter: public ad tech is now graded on operating discipline, not top-line momentum — and retail media has not repealed gravity.

As growth normalizes, networks and their technology partners get measured on margins, efficiency and consolidation potential, and that will redraw the vendor map — pricing pressure and consolidation cut both ways for brands, creating risk in incumbent relationships and leverage in new ones. The companies that survive the next two years will be the ones that built real efficiency into their operations, not the ones that chased every dollar of revenue at any cost. Watch who owns their data and controls their margins; that is the survivor list forming in plain sight.