Powering a retail media network with real-time consent infrastructure

As this Fortune 50 retailer accelerates its digital transformation, it’s building a multi-billion-dollar retail media business to unlock new revenue streams and deepen brand partnerships. But to do it right, the company needed real-time privacy infrastructure that could unify customer signals, automate consent enforcement across channels, and ensure every impression is fully permissioned. Transcend now powers that foundation—helping transform first-party data into trusted signal and strategic growth.

At a glance

• The customer: A leading global retailer with close to 200 million members, undergoing a major digital transformation to support the launch of a new Retail Media Network (RMN) projected to drive $3–10B in annual revenue.
• The challenge: Fragmented customer identifiers, manual privacy workflows, and the lack of a centralized consent orchestration layer—putting RMN signal integrity, launch timelines, and compliance posture at risk. The company needed a unified engine to orchestrate real-time consent across its complex marketing tech stack, automate enforcement across channels, and resolve identities at scale to deliver accurate, privacy-respecting signals to advertisers.
• Why they chose Transcend: Transcend offered a unified engine for real-time consent orchestration across the entire tech ecosystem, resolving identity across systems, enabling automated enforcement, and delivering enterprise-grade observability and scale.

The challenge: disconnected signals and manual work were slowing a high-stakes launch

Retail media is poised to redefine how retailers monetize their owned channels—and the market is moving fast. Industry estimates project over $100B in retail media revenue globally by 2026, with top-tier retailers expected to generate up to $5B annually from ad sales alone. This retailer has ambitions to capitalize on that opportunity by building a competitive, insights-rich network powered by first-party data from its close to 200 million customers. To successfully do so, advertisers would need permissioned data in real time and internal systems would require unified enforcement of consent preferences across all marketing and commerce touchpoints.

But the company’s internal architecture wasn’t yet ready to support the demands of real-time advertising at that scale.

Preference signals were fragmented. Customer identifiers couldn’t be reliably mapped between systems. Manual processes slowed execution, introduced risk, and made it difficult to confidently deliver personalized experiences at scale.

Although the internal team had built a custom preference center interface, it lacked the backend orchestration to operationalize customer choices across downstream platforms—threatening both compliance posture and launch timelines.

Why they chose Transcend:

The enterprise’s Retail Media Network initiative was driven by a cross-functional coalition, spanning Marketing, AdTech, Data, and Engineering. Stakeholders evaluated multiple vendors against a long list of enterprise-grade criteria including security posture, extensibility, service level guarantees, and technical flexibility.

Transcend was selected as the strategic infrastructure partner for four key reasons:

1. Unified preference orchestration: Transcend’s identity resolution and orchestration engine allows the company to centralize preferences across domains, member IDs, devices, and brands.
2. Real-time data enforcement: The platform’s ability to push consent updates into existing data and marketing systems, ranging from CDPs and CRM tools to web and mobile apps, helped automate the entire lifecycle of privacy preferences.
3. AI-powered telemetry and observability: Transcend's built-in tracker detection and classification systems gave teams visibility into third-party tags and compliance posture across their digital ecosystem.
4. High-capacity, low-latency infrastructure: With over 150 million profiles and billions of potential transactions, Transcend’s platform delivered the enterprise scale and reliability the company needed to support global RMN operations.

After a rigorous review process and multiple technical validations, the company signed a multi-year agreement to expand its usage of Transcend, with preference orchestration now supporting one of its most strategically important business initiatives.

The path forward: a foundation for trusted growth and signal quality

With Transcend in place, the company has implemented a centralized consent and preference engine—one that spans its e-commerce, mobile, and in-store experiences, while serving the real-time needs of its Retail Media Network.

And as the market continues to shift toward first-party data and high-trust personalization, this global retailer now has the infrastructure to lead—not just in compliance, but in revenue growth, digital agility, and consumer trust.

They join a growing list of category leaders choosing Transcend to power the privacy backbone behind their most ambitious digital transformations.