As one of the USA’s largest retailers, retail pharmacy CVS is unsurprisingly a leader in retail media in the pharmacy sector, via its retail media network, CVS Media Exchange (CMX). This is built around a backbone of CVS’s ExtraCare loyalty programme and taps into the data of some 74mn active members.
The network offers both managed and self-service options and, as of mid-2024, select advertisers can activate campaigns autonomously via a beta self-serveplatform – powered by The Trade Desk – with targeting, pricing and performance tracking through the DSP.
Results have been impressive. According to CVS’s own data, a holiday campaign for FMCG company Mars for M&M’s saw three in 10 buyers being new-to-brand, demonstrating CMX’s strength in driving incremental demand. Separately, a campaign with skincare brand Eucerin drove customer reactivation to 1.6Å~ lift compared to benchmark strategies.
However, where CVS stands out is in how it has started to look beyond the ‘traditional’ offsite platforms and embrace new ways to get its message out there. CMX is one of the first retail media networks to look to leverage audio channels via Spotify, as well as shaking up the approach to social in offsite by working with Reddit.
Back in 2022, CVS partnered with Spotify and the advertising agency FCB for the “A song for every CMO campaign, which used hyper-personalised, custom-written songs to reach their own CMOs at CVS. This campaign leveraged Spotify’s targeting capabilities to deliver a memorable, shareable audio experience that blurred the lines between marketing and entertainment, aimed at demonstrating the platform’s power to other brands’ CMOs. While targeting the industry rather than consumers, the campaign has done much to sow the seeds of how audio can be used in offsite.
More recently, CVS has partnered with social news and forum aggregator Reddit. From June 2025, CVS is concentrating on promoted posts and conversation placement that are targeted and matched to user behaviour and groups on Reddit. These posts will enable brands to generate traffic and sales by ‘naturally’ joiningconversations between users and relevant communities.
This plays to what CMX’s VP and general manager Parbinder Dhariwal sees as the next phase of retail media: co-creation and collaboration, where shared platforms are developed to build audiences.
To learn more, download the RetailX Offsite data workbench report in association with Koddi, which takes Koddi’s survey data and RetailX consumer data to assess the trajectory of the offsite retail media sector, offering a data analysis, a deep dive into implications, a range of case studies and company profiles that show offsite in action and a boardroom brief and roadmap as to where to go next.
