NBCUniversal and Walmart Expand Partnership at Cannes Lions 2025 to Power Full-Funnel Performance with Live Sports and Shopper Data

As NBCUniversal continues to champion the power of live content at Cannes Lions 2025, the company announced a significant expansion of its partnership with Walmart. Following a dynamic takeover of the iconic FreeWheel Beach with “Vive le Live,” NBCUniversal revealed plans to further prove how premium content serves as a full-funnel performance engine for marketers, leveraging the immense scale and precision of Walmart’s shopper data.

Walmart Connect continues to enhance its diverse suite of offerings, aiming to reach customers in meaningful ways wherever they spend their time. By strategically targeting consumers, advertisers can now connect with a broad audience of sports enthusiasts, particularly during high-impact live sports events.

Together, NBCUniversal and Walmart will bring advanced audience targeting and cross-platform attribution measurement to NBCUniversal’s unparalleled lineup of live sports programming. This collaboration is fully powered by the immense scale and precision of Walmart’s first-party shopper data, creating a formidable competitive advantage for advertisers.

This expanded partnership unites the world’s largest retailer with a leading global media and entertainment company, offering advertisers massive competitive scale to engage with the highly valued sports viewer.

Beginning in Q4 2025, select advertisers will gain the ability to reach targeted, strategic audiences and precisely measure the impact of their streaming and linear media campaigns within NBCUniversal’s unmatched portfolio of live sports moments.

This expansion follows a successful initial test between NBCU and Walmart, which yielded incredible results for Walmart’s own marketing campaigns: a 4x Return on Ad Spend, a +10% increase in ad recall, and a +5x QR code scan rate compared to the retail benchmark.

Mark Marshall, Chairman, Global Advertising and Partnerships, NBCUniversal, emphasized the significance of this collaboration from the Cannes stage:

“Using Walmart as a marketer was a great way to test. The challenge for marketers is getting the reach in the timeframe you need. Live sports delivers that instantaneous reach… To be able to look at live sports across linear and digital and demonstrate what it delivers for you – actual sales and impact data – that’s exciting.”

“TV delivers reach and will also bring new customers in. If you are just targeting the same customers over and over, the incrementality isn’t going to pay off for you.”

“We try to make a decision between linear and digital so often because consumers are making choices. But the fact is 83% of viewing for the 2024 Paris Olympics was still done on linear television.”

“Last year we rolled out One Platform Total Audience (OPTA), and the idea with that is to take linear and digital on the same media plan and look at reach and frequency, and at the center was Comcast’s set-top box data. You can now look at reach and frequency and guarantee against strategic audience… Having linear and digital together on the same plan – no one has done that except for us.”

This expanded partnership underscores NBCUniversal’s commitment to delivering measurable outcomes for marketers by combining premium live content with unparalleled data insights, setting a new standard for advertising effectiveness in the sports landscape.