In a recent webinar, Savannah Sloop from Walmart Connect’s Technology Partnerships team sat down with Brandon Viveiros, Chief Commerce Officer at AdFury.ai, to explore how advertisers can drive measurable business impact through stronger creative strategies, especially by leveraging artificial intelligence.
The conversation highlighted Walmart Connect’s unique scale, the fundamentals of retail readiness, creative best practices, and how AI is reshaping how brands approach speed, personalization and compliance.
Walmart Connect’s Unique Scale and Value
The discussion opened with a look at the sheer scale and strategic value of Walmart Connect. According to the Walmart Connect website, Walmart serves approximately 150 million customers every week, both in-store and online, making it one of the largest and most valuable customer ecosystems in retail. It is also one of the fastest-growing e-commerce platform in the U.S., according to Ced Commerce. creating new opportunities for brands looking to reach shoppers at scale.
According to Teikametrics, about 13% of visitors to Walmart.com do not visit Amazon in the same month, representing roughly 16 million shoppers that advertisers may not reach elsewhere. Additionally, higher‑income audiences are increasingly important to Walmart’s sales, according to Observer, reinforcing that Walmart’s digital growth is not limited to price-driven consumers.
Walmart Connect’s mission is to help advertisers connect more effectively with customers and drive impact both online and in-store. This includes delivering exceptional reach, enabling access to unique and relevant audiences, offering omnichannel solutions and providing enhanced data and measurement capabilities to tie advertising efforts back to business outcomes.
Retail Readiness: The Foundation for Success
Before any creative or media strategy can succeed, Sloop emphasized the importance of retail readiness. This foundation includes ensuring products are in stock, winning the buy box, and being published in the correct category. It also means optimizing product detail pages with compelling copy, clear value propositions and high-quality imagery.
Equally important is aligning advertising campaigns with clear business objectives. Whether the goal is awareness, consideration or conversion, advertisers must define success upfront and establish measurable KPIs to evaluate performance.
Creative Best Practices and the ART Framework
Strong creative execution plays a critical role in campaign performance. According to Walmart Connect data shared in the session, following creative best practices can deliver a 50% lift in brand memorability and positive association, along with a 31% higher click-through rate.
Walmart outlined four execution principles for creative success:
- The 40/60 Rule: Creative should balance 40% brand storytelling with 60% Walmart’s native design language to feel authentic to the platform.
- Test and Learn: Advertisers should test up to five creatives per ad group to refine messaging and identify what resonates.
- Consistency: Messaging and visuals should remain consistent from the ad itself through to the landing destination.
- QA Discipline: Teams should regularly review specs, ensure assets meet quality standards and confirm landing pages are live before launch.
To simplify creative evaluation, Walmart introduced the ART framework:
- Attract Attention: The product should be the hero, using color, contrast and composition to stop the scroll and reduce confusion.
- Reinforce Brand Association: Once attention is earned, the creative should clearly link the product to the brand to build trust and familiarity.
- Tap into Relevance: The message must be useful, timely and appropriate for the shopper’s specific shopping moment.
The Role of AI in Modern Creative
Viveiros discussed how marketers today face increasing pressure around scale, speed, personalization and compliance. AI, when used correctly, can help address all four.
AI enables brands to scale creative output dramatically, generating full sets of ads across placements in minutes rather than weeks. It also supports personalization, using audience inputs to create more relevant messaging for different shopper segments. On the compliance front, AI can learn Walmart’s specifications and best practices, improving approval rates and reducing friction in the launch process.
Importantly, Viveiros emphasized that AI should be viewed as a collaborator rather than a replacement for strategy. As complexity and volume increase, AI becomes invaluable – especially for high-volume, high-velocity and lower-complexity creative tasks – while humans remain essential for strategic direction and judgment.
Inside AdFury’s AI-Powered Workflow
AdFury.ai, a native AI company, demonstrated how this collaboration works in practice. Their platform supports generative creative for display ads, PDP imagery and sponsored video through agentic workflows that keep humans in the loop.
Their five-step display ad workflow includes:
- Selecting the brand and product, training AI on brand guidelines and product details.
- Defining targeting strategies to align creative output with media objectives.
- Generating ad variations tailored to each placement.
- Revising and remixing, allowing users to edit visuals or copy through AI prompts.
- Reviewing, approving and publishing, with direct API integration into Walmart Ad Center.
Smart Variation and Human Oversight
The webinar concluded with guidance on creative variation and strategy. Generally, three to five variations per ad group are sufficient when each version has a clear difference in message or visual focus while maintaining consistent branding.
Awareness creative is most effective when launching new products, entering new categories, reaching competitive or net-new shoppers, or supporting seasonal moments. Conversion-focused creative performs best when shoppers already know the brand or when there is a clear, urgent offer.
While AI can significantly reduce compliance risk by enforcing specs and flagging errors, both speakers stressed that human oversight remains critical, particularly for evaluating brand tone, nuance, substantiating claims and giving final approval before launch.
Together, Walmart Connect and AdFury.ai painted a clear picture: brands that combine retail readiness, disciplined creative strategy and AI-powered execution are best positioned to drive meaningful impact in today’s retail media landscape.
