CANNES – Retailers that sell advertising make up a fast-growing part of the media marketplace. Drugstore chain CVS Pharmacy’s CVS Media Exchange, or CMX, recently began collaborating with demand-side platform The Trade Desk for self-service media buying.
“Connected innovation for us is really at the center of everything that we do. It really bridges how we think about what customers are trying to solve,” Raphaela Walsh, head of product at CMX, said in this interview with Jon Watts, managing director the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement trade group, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
CMX and The Trade Desk began to test a self-serve DSP for targeting and attributing programmatic campaigns using the pharmacy chain’s first-party data and loyalty program.
“It’s finding like-minded partners, being really focused on how we understand the problem from our clients,” Walsh said. “We do a ton of what I call ‘soul-searching,’ but it’s really industry research and being obsessed of what really is the problem, what’s really the friction points that we need to kind of unlock.”
CMX seeks to differentiate itself from other media channels by emphasizing its first-hand knowledge of what members of its ExtraCare loyalty program are buying, whether that’s online or among its national footprint of drugstores.
“We’re part of a much larger organization, CVS, and they sit at the center of health and wellness,” Walsh said. “Within that, we have access to an incredible differentiated audience: 74 million ExtraCare members, of which we have access of their data, 5 million daily visits in store, and then about 139 million monthly visitors on online and web.”
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