This conversation with CVS Media Exchange (CMX) gets at something Todd and I have been talking about for a long time: retail media may finally be delivering on the original promise of digital advertising.

For years, the industry talked about being able to connect advertising exposure to real purchase behavior, personalize campaigns in real time, and stop serving people ads for products they already bought. But most of digital advertising was ultimately built on probabilistic identity, fragmented signals, and incomplete attribution.

In this episode, Parbinder “Parbs” Dhariwal explains why CMX believes loyalty infrastructure and deterministic transaction data change that equation. We discuss CMX’s new CorIQ AI platform, why retail media has become the center of online advertising, how CVS thinks about in-store media at scale, and why loyalty programs still matter far more than many people in the industry want to admit.

We also get into Reddit and Pinterest partnerships, incrementality and measurement standards, and what happens when one of the largest retailers in healthcare starts thinking about advertising as infrastructure instead of just monetization.

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