Module 11 · Lesson 1
Marty: Your AI Advertising Assistant
What you’ll learn
- What Marty is and where it lives
- The questions it can answer and reports it generates
- Why it especially helps smaller advertisers
- How to use it as a partner, not a crutch
Walmart Connect went “AI-first” in 2026, and the change most likely to touch your daily work is Marty — an agentic AI advertising assistant built right into Ad Center. It turns campaign management from navigating dashboards into simply asking questions.
What Marty is
Marty is a conversational advertising assistant — part of Walmart’s broader “Marty” agent — that helps you build, optimise and troubleshoot Sponsored Search campaigns through plain-language chat. Instead of hunting through reports, you ask it directly. It launched in beta for Sponsored Search and has been rolling out to advertisers through 2026, so availability keeps expanding — check what’s live in your account.
From dashboards to dialogue
The shift Marty represents: static reports become a conversation. “Why did this campaign’s spend jump?” or “what should I bid on this keyword?” get answered in context, with recommendations you can act on — no report-diving required.
What it can do
- Answer natural-language questions on bidding, keywords and billing.
- Give recommendations and personalised alerts on your campaigns.
- Help build and troubleshoot campaigns, including listing/content quality issues.
- Generate research reports — including Change Analysis and impression-share (share-of-voice) benchmarks — to measure performance.
Why it matters for smaller advertisers
This is the part that should interest you most as a seller. Marty levels the field: expertise that used to require an agency or years of experience is now available through chat. For smaller and newer advertisers, it lowers the barrier to running campaigns competently — a genuine democratisation of retail-media skill.
Use it as a partner, not a crutch
You still own the strategy
Marty is a strategic partner, not autopilot. It doesn’t know your margins or your target ACoS — so run its bid suggestions through your own Max CPC math from Module 8 before acting. Let it speed up your analysis and surface issues; let you make the profit-based calls.
The wider AI toolkit
Marty sits alongside other AI features arriving in Ad Center: automated creative generation (for example, a Brand Shop builder that produces lifestyle imagery in minutes) and GenAI reporting like end-of-campaign and path-to-conversion insights. The direction is clear — less time troubleshooting, more time on strategy and creative.
Quick recap
- Marty is Walmart’s conversational AI assistant in Ad Center for Sponsored Search.
- Ask it about bidding, keywords and billing; it gives recommendations, alerts and reports.
- It lowers the skill barrier — a real advantage for smaller and newer advertisers.
- Treat it as a partner: it doesn’t know your margins, so validate its advice with your own bid math.