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The CIO’s Checklist for Collaborating with Key Media Partners

  • - Amanda Freuler
  • 2 min read

The consumer journey is fragmenting more each day. As companies strive to remain relevant, CIOs and CMOs have an opportunity to work together to sharpen media strategies and meet consumers at the right time across the open web, getting closer to having a closed-loop measurement program while bolstering customer intelligence.

Diego Vaccarezza, Executive Director, Enterprise Media at CVS Health, has led CVS’ media evolution from a primarily print, circular-driven organization to one that executes multi-channel campaigns with sophisticated audience segmentation. His team’s earliest wins happened when they activated with a single media partner.

“Those early results showed that we had something, that we could indeed activate our data for targeting and measurement and really see material business results,”  Vaccarezza said. “I think it was those early wins that put us on the path where we find ourselves now, which is scaling and growing off of those first test campaigns into a viable business model and fundamentally a new revenue stream for CVS.”

To evaluate a media partner’s ability to safely and securely handle your data, here is a checklist of questions to ask about their data collaboration technology: 

  1. Strength of privacy technology: Is their privacy technology rooted in mathematical definitions, or do you hear, “Just take our word for it?” Legacy approaches are not grounded in theory.
  2. Multi-party support: Am I able to enforce my own privacy standards and controls in a multi-party context or must I accept what everyone else is doing?
  3. Security: Can I leave my data within a secure perimeter or does collaborating with others require that data move outside of my data infrastructure?

Answers to these questions lay the groundwork for building a strong media partnership that delivers on business objectives and provides a more accurate read on marketing effectiveness. Moreover, if you are a retailer, hospitality group, or another company rich in first-party data, this due diligence can be a stepping stone to eventually launching your own media network.