Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter and Pinterest add offline attribution via Nielsen Catalina

Dive Brief:

Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) announced it has partnered with Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter and Pinterest in a press release made available to Marketing Dive. The platforms will join NCS's previous partners including Facebook and Pandora.
NCS provides CPG marketers with measurement on the in-store impact of digital advertising on its partner platforms by combining Catalina's shopper database of more than 90 million U.S. households with Nielsen's retail sales and consumer panel data. NCS' methodology leverages machine learning technology to connect media exposure including both digital and TV with shopper data to outline where consumers were exposed to brand messaging and how that exposure eventually impacted offline purchases.
NCS previously worked with Spotify on a study of 11 CPG campaigns that found those working with multiple formats and multiple platforms delivered higher sales response than those done via a single format or platform.

Dive Insight:

Figuring out offline attribution for digital marketing efforts has been a hurdle for the industry, but NCS now teaming with essentially all of the major digital platforms should provide brands with a richer well of data to draw insights from. Snapchat, Pinterest and Spotify have grown quickly over the past few years, developing huge, highly engaged audiences brands are eager to reach.

Snapchat, in particular, is making location-based marketing a more central part of its strategy as it looks to carve out a niche in the social media space, with a Snap to Store attribution tool and the recent acquisition of the location analytics platform Placed.

NCS is able to determine whether a household has been exposed to an ad and then if that household bought the product. Per NCS, its leverages data from Catalina, the Nielsen Homescan panel and Nielsen RMS to create nationally projectable buy transactions and integrates it with ad exposure data from digital pubishers for a single source database.

For marketers, the Holy Grail of measurement is directly linking a person how has viewed a TV or digital ad to an in-store purchase and news like Snapchat and others partnering with NCS brings that a step closer to reality. Industry players ranging from Google and Facebook to RetailMeNot and xAd are all also working toward providing a concrete solution.