Observed Signal · Mar 3, 2026 · Interview · Source: Adweek · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Sam's Club Transforms Membership with AI-Driven Experience
At CES, Sam’s Club EVP and chief experience officer Diana Marshall described the retailer’s shift to a human-led, tech-powered membership strategy that treats experience as the primary differentiator. Sam’s Club has formalized an experience organization within the Walmart enterprise, emphasizes associate experience as foundational, and leverages closed-loop membership data and AI-driven personalization to enable next-best-action engines and real-time contextual experiences. The company positions its Member Access Platform (MAP) as a “retail experience network” — a retail-media capability designed to improve member experience while driving acquisition, loyalty, and brand partner outcomes. Marshall also emphasized leadership principles that prioritize humanity alongside automation.
Highlights a major retailer using first‑party membership data, AI personalization, and retail media repositioning (MAP) to drive acquisition, loyalty, and measurement—relevant to brands, advertisers, and retail media tech providers but not an industry‑shifting platform policy change.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Sam’s Club has formalized an experience organization — a first within the Walmart enterprise.
- Diana Marshall is EVP and chief experience officer at Sam’s Club and leads the retailer’s experience transformation.
- Sam’s Club leverages closed-loop membership data to power unified data systems, next-best-action engines, and real-time personalization.
- Sam’s Club’s Member Access Platform (MAP) is positioned as a “retail experience network” that integrates retail media with member experience goals.
- Sam’s Club prioritizes associate experience (onboarding, tools, culture) as a prerequisite to improving member experience in a tech-enabled retail environment.
Connected Companies & Entities
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Related Market Signals & Shifts
Recent verified developments and strategic activity across this market segment.
Retail Marketing’s Future: First-Party Data
An ADWEEK House Cannes Lions panel co-hosted with Sam’s Club argued that retail marketing should prioritize first-party data and customer insights to build long-term relationships beyond immediate ROAS. Sam’s Club’s membership model — which requires members to scan an ID at checkout — creates persistent shopper signals that the retailer and brand partners can use to target and measure campaigns. P&G’s Jacques Hagopian described a Sam’s Club use case where first-party member data helped P&G identify 800,000 likely households for Cascade Platinum Plus, producing a reported 2X increase in marketing effectiveness. Panelists also highlighted AI and emerging “agentic” automation as tools to scale personalized, continuous retail experiences and to power more creative in‑store activations that convert to sales.
Walmart Brings Scintilla Data Platform to Sam’s Club
Walmart will expand its first-party customer data and analytics platform, Scintilla, to Sam’s Club in the U.S. next year, aiming to give Sam’s Club merchants and suppliers access to sales, inventory, shopping-pattern and customer-survey data to improve assortment, availability and member experience. The platform sits under Walmart Data Ventures and has previously expanded to Mexico and Canada; Walmart has also rolled out API access to allow advertisers and agencies to securely share Walmart first-party operational and retail data with partners.
Sam's Club Launches Predictive Ad Targeting Suite
Sam's Club Connect, the membership-based retailer's advertising business, launched a suite of new predictive targeting and measurement products. The tools allow brands to create custom predictive modeling audiences for churn prevention, brand loyalty, and targeting shoppers likely to make high-end purchases. One product, Predictive Precision Targeting, was tested by Procter & Gamble for Cascade Platinum dish detergent, achieving a 94% accuracy rate in identifying households with a propensity to upgrade and a 71% increase in total spend. The suite also includes tools for conquesting campaigns and forecasting buyers for rare, high-end items like TVs, leveraging Sam's Club's longitudinal member purchase data and AI models.
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