There are three legs of the stool to make a retail media network incredibly powerful: it’s working in conjunction with the merchant organization, in conjunction with the marketing organization, and having those things working in tandem to drive great experiences for the consumer.
As retail media networks get more sophisticated, you’re going to see that moving outside of traditional trade funds and into brand dollars. As cookies start to deprecate, you’re going to see us supporting brands to help them understand what’s happening from a consumer standpoint.
People often talk about retail media “collapsing the marketing funnel.” And while that’s a buzzy statement, it poses measurement challenges. How is CVS approaching measurement and metrics to ensure that you have the right tools for advertisers?
I’d go as bold as saying it’s already collapsed. We are right next to the consumer. Measurement is really important to us as we go through that process and continue to collapse the funnel.
Transparency is a really important part of what we stand for at CMX. We were one of the first retail media networks and the first health and wellness retail media network to implement the IAB standards, four weeks after they were published. We implemented high standards around the practices of showing match rates and making a lot of the metrics visible to our suppliers.
Earlier this year, we launched Pinterest as a platform. When we see an ExtraCare consumer on Pinterest and they click on or engage with an ad and then come back into the CVS ecosystem, how do we measure that? You’re going to see more partnerships in the marketplace to drive transparency around how dollars are being spent.
How is CVS working to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded RMN landscape?
Differentiation for us will come consistently in the loyalty program because of what we have access to. We have that at scale through CVS pharmacy, which is 9,000 locations and 5 million people engaging with those locations every single day, and a pretty significant footprint when it comes to CVS.com.
We launched self-serve [ads] with The Trade Desk. We’ll go into a closed beta environment with a certain number of suppliers very shortly.
Transparency is a differentiator for us that we will continue to provide the market—whether it’s how we’re targeting, which sites we’re using, how we’re building measurement solutions, how we’re driving incrementality metrics for our suppliers and so on. There are 200-plus retail media networks. We want to capitalize within the categories that we operate with given our breadth and trust in our brand.
