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After building his résumé with stints at CBS and Spotify, Parbinder Dhariwal saw the growth opportunity in retail media before it was projected to gobble up $140 billion this year, according to Emarketer.
He headed up beauty for Walmart Connect before becoming vice president and general manager of CVS’ retail media arm, CVS Media Exchange (or CMX) in 2022. ADWEEK sat down with Dhariwal to discuss how the pharmacy chain is building a retail media business into a 61-year-old retailer.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
ADWEEK: How is the retail media network driving growth for CVS?
Parbinder Dhariwal: We don’t break out the revenue for CMX. That’s not to say that we won’t in the future. CMX drives consumer engagement and that drives growth—it drives footfall and incremental growth for products and brands.
A retail media network, done in the right way, should be a mechanism to engage consumers and enable them to discover products that they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. We constantly see that within the CVS environment. People go, “Oh, I didn’t know you carried that brand at CVS.” You discover that when you’re in the physical stores. We’re trying to bring that level of discoverability to consumers in the digital environment as well.
We’re built on a loyalty program [ExtraCare] that understands the consumer as they move from physical to digital to physical, wherever they start and end their journey. There are 74 million ExtraCare consumers that we’re working with on a day-to-day basis. What we’re looking at is understanding consumer behavior and how they’re interacting with our brand and purchasing products. And then, how do we drive growth for that brand? And how do we drive brand switching for that brand based on the attributes and understanding that we have of that consumer across the categories within which we operate, which are beauty, personal care, health, wellness and general merchandise?
We’ve heard a lot about the internal challenges that retailers face when building out a retail media business because the goals of the RMN can sometimes conflict with—and overlap with—the merchandising and sales teams. How is CVS navigating those organizational challenges?
I don’t believe any retailer has fully figured it out. We’re still working hard to make sure there is consistency, collaboration, and a cohesive way to keep the consumer at the center of everything that we do. It’s not easy setting up a retail media network. You have to have a robust data set, and we have that with ExtraCare. We also need strong alignment across the leadership team, which I have both within my leadership team and within the merchant organization.
