Catalina ties digital ads to real-world purchases across 700 audience segments

Dive Brief:

Shopper intelligence firm Catalina Marketing will offer new ways to target and measure the impact of digital ads by consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers on in-store sales, according to a press release.
Through a collaboration with identity resolution provider LiveRamp, sales lift measurement services and over 700 new audience segments will be made available in this quarter. The segments — for advertisers on TV, social media and programmatic channels — will be offered through LiveRamp's Data Store.
The new segments will be categorized by "Shopper Personality," utilizing purchase behaviors, purchased product ingredients and lifestyle motivations.

Dive Insight:

Marketers continue to look for ways to prove the effectiveness of their digital ads, including by matching them to offline sales, something that can be a challenge since such transactional data is often tightly held by retailers. The Catalina news could be a big step forward on this front for marketers, given the company's reach into physical stores. Catalina's ID Graph is based largely on loyalty cards used with purchases in physical stores, and that data will be matched with LiveRamp's device and identity data. Those loyalty cards generate two-year shopping patterns for about 170 million consumers, and they will now be mapped to 390 million digital devices and 85 million households.

The shopping patterns are determined down to the product UPC bar codes, tracking over two billion daily transactions across a network of U.S. retailers. By matching purchase-based audience target segments with devices, the impact of specific online ads can be tracked to purchases in physical stores. LiveRamp executive Grant Ries described this as "a virtual CRM system for CPG advertisers," allowing them to create "their own scalable data supply chains."

Catalina noted that it will also add demographic information, insights about ingredients purchased by anonymized shoppers, location-based data and data based on panels of consumers, as well as predictions about new kinds of products or other forecasts.

The firm is pointing to the announcement as another step in its digital transformation, as it moves to expand beyond its base of loyalty card info from brick-and-mortar stores. Last month, Catalina announced a partnership with TV data firm Samba TV to integrate its loyalty card behavioral data with advertising data, particularly linear and over-the-top TV. In January, Catalina released its first attribution service to trace digital advertising to purchases made in physical stores with loyalty cards.

Catalina isn't alone in trying to make it easier for CPG marketers — a category that includes some of the world's largest advertisers — to measure their marketing efforts across physical and digital channels. A number of big supermarket chains have a created their own digital media platforms, including Albertson's.