CVS Launches Beta Self-Service Offering
Health-and-wellness retail media network CVS Media Exchange (CMX) has launched a new beta self-service offering in collaboration with The Trade Desk, an independent media-buying platform. The partnership serves as CMX’s latest move toward expanding access and transparency to help advance the retail media industry, enabling omnichannel scalability with high levels of autonomy and control. Select partners will be able to start using the service in Q3 of 2024.
“The unveiling of our new closed beta self-service offering will mark a groundbreaking leap for CMX, unleashing autonomy and efficiency for both our platform and select partners, revolutionizing campaign management and optimization,” said Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and general manager of CVS Media Exchange. “With CVS Pharmacy serving as one of the most trusted brands in the country, and with deep insights available into the needs, preferences and shopping behaviors of nearly 74 million ExtraCare customers, advertisers can unlock quality reach and targeting precision.”
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The new offering will give advertiser partners more ways to engage CVS ExtraCare shoppers via such off-site channels as programmatic display and connected TV, providing:
- Audience Access: Advertisers can improve the targeting precision of their campaigns with verified buyer audiences, beginning with category and subcategory audiences during the closed beta phase.
- Pricing Transparency: The solution offers complete transparency into audience and measurement costs, giving advertisers full insight into their media spend, thereby reducing ad waste.
- Autonomous Media Activation: Advertisers can directly activate and optimize media within the platform through their DSP seat, reaching audiences at every point of their path to purchase.
- Performance Insights: Supplier partners can track the success of their digital campaigns from exposure to attributed in-store and online sales.
As well as these new self-service capabilities, managed service capabilities will still be available for all on-site and off-site channels.
“Our partnership with CVS Media Exchange will make it easy for brands and agencies to access the deterministic signals they need to reach verified buyers throughout their customer journey, as well as see the sales impact from their media investment,” said Ben Sylvan, VP, data partnerships at The Trade Desk, which is based in Ventura, Calif. “Our partnership will make it easier than ever for advertisers to grow their brands by activating across premium environments, like CTV, all from a single point of entry.”
“Retail media offers myriad benefits to brands – most critically, bringing them closer to consumers’ full purchase lifecycle and closing the loop between media investment and key business metrics like sales,” noted Megan Pagliuca, chief activation officer of New York-based Omnicom Media Group North America. “Self-service offerings like that which CVS Media Exchange is bringing to market in partnership with The Trade Desk support our ‘gates-over-walls’ approach to the retail media ecosystem and enable our teams and clients to have the speed, flexibility and control necessary to operate at the speed of modern commerce.”
Additionally, in close collaboration with the New York- and Washington, D.C.-based IAB, CMX is helping to create industry guidelines, recently becoming the first health-and-wellness-focused retail media network to measure and report attributed sales based on viewable impressions. CMX’s dashboard also gives select suppliers access to a comprehensive data set to use in their mix media models, and the team recently launched an iROAS beta program that employs one of the IAB-recommended incrementality methods.
This work builds on the momentum from a recent clean-room partnership with Pinterest and LiveRamp to deliver greater transparency, with CMX the first health-and-wellness retail media network to take part in this initiative.
With its CVS Pharmacy subsidiary, Woonsocket, R.I.-based CVS Health has 300,000-plus colleagues – including more than 40,000 physicians, pharmacists, nurses and nurse practitioners. The company is No. 5 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2024 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.
