CVS Media Exchange partners with The Trade Desk

CVS Media Exchange, a health & wellness retail media network, is unveiling its new beta self-service offering in collaboration with The Trade Desk, an independent media buying platform. 

This collaboration serves as the latest move CMX has made towards expanding access and transparency to help drive the retail media industry forward, enabling omnichannel scalability with exceptional levels of autonomy and control. 

"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, vice president 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."   

[Read more: Albertsons Media Collective debuts Collective TV]

The new offering will provide advertiser partners more ways to reach CVS ExtraCare shoppers across off-site channels including programmatic display and connected TV, providing: 

• Audience Access: Advertisers will be able to enhance the targeting precision of their campaigns with verified buyer audiences, starting with category and subcategory audiences during the closed beta phase. 
• Pricing Transparency: The offering will provide complete transparency for audience and measurement costs, giving advertisers full insight into their media spend, reducing ad waste. 
• Autonomous Media Activation: Advertisers will be able to directly activate and optimize media within the platform through their DSP seat, reaching audiences at every stage of their path to purchase. 
• Performance Insights: Supplier partners will be able to track the success of their digital campaigns from exposure to attributed in-store and online sales. 

In addition to these new self-service capabilities, managed service capabilities will remain 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, vice president, data partnerships at The Trade Desk. “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,” said Megan Pagliuca, chief activation officer at 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.” 

[Read more: Albertsons Media Collective partners with Rokt to extend retail media ecosystem]

In close collaboration with the IAB, CMX also is helping to shape industry guidelines to set the bar even higher, recently becoming the first health and wellness focused retail media network to measure and report attributed sales based on viewable impressions (a recently introduced retail media measurement guideline set by the IAB). CMX’s dashboard also grants 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 leverages one of the IAB-recommended incrementality methods, the company said. 

This builds on the momentum from the recent clean room partnership with Pinterest and LiveRamp aimed at delivering greater transparency, with CMX serving as the first health and wellness retail media network to embark on this initiative, the company noted.