CVS’ retail media platform, CVS Media Exchange, (CMX) will adopt the LiveRamp data clean room solution rolled out by Pinterest, so that its consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers can track product sales coming from Pinterest ads.
It is another move showing the growing adoption of the clean room technology, which allows for anonymized consumer data matching, as well as the enhanced functionality companies are finding as they move away from traditional ad identifiers. But it is also a growing sign of the capabilities retail media networks are bringing to the market.
At CES 2023, Pinterest announced it would partner with LiveRamp to pilot clean rooms for select advertising partners. Albertsons Media Collective, another retail media operator, would be the first advertiser using the new solution.
CVS’ Data Play
Pinterest told Beet.TV that retail media networks’ advertising customers are demanding to know where their dollars go. Now CVS Media Exchange will leverage the platform, too.
Parbinder Dhariwal, VP, GM, CVS Media Exchange, spoke with Beet.TV a month ago about responding to ad signal loss and cookie deprecation. We are republishing the interview here.
“Around about 85% of America is within 10 miles of a CVS,” he says. “This ad business is predicated upon 74 million ExtraCare consumers. … Cookie deprecation is not necessarily a challenge for us.”
Key Trends
The tie-up sees the coming-together of a number of key parts, all of which are hot trends in the advertising world:
- Retail loyalty scheme data is finding a new life in advertising environments, acting as the glue that can help prove an end purchase. CVS Media Exchange will leverage data from its ExtraCare loyalty program, which includes purchase data from 74 million people in America.
- But it will pseudonymize that data before putting it in the Pinterest/LiveRamp clean room, which acts as a neutral space, revealing audience overlaps without revealing consumers’ identities to either party.
- Retail media networks (RMNs, ecommerce operators that take ad spend from their own suppliers for enhanced visibility in their online stores) are increasingly extending their capabilities off their own platform, allowing RMN ads to be placed elsewhere.
- Publishers like Pinterest are making a play for some of that spend, buoyed by the way clean rooms obviate the privacy risk that would otherwise make it impossible for RMNs to partner-up.
- All of this is happening amidst the deprecation of many traditional audience identifiers, which it was previously possible to match across such services. Despite concern, many companies are finding alternative technology offers much more robustness.
- CVS Media Exchange’s announcement says: “With this technology, CMX can measure attributed sales related to campaigns more accurately and share that information with CPG supplier partners in the CMX Performance Dashboard. This information helps brands refine future strategies to drive meaningful results.”
