Announcing New Purchase-Based Audience Targeting & Measurement

In order to close the loop between out-of-home media buys and consumer purchasing behavior — a challenge that is particularly important for CPG advertisers — we recently announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Catalina, the leader in shopper intelligence and home of the world’s richest real-time shopper database.  

This new partnership will enable robust out-of-home (OOH) ad targeting and sales lift measurement insights based on actual, in-store product purchases. And it’s a game-changer.  Here’s why...

A New Level of Insight for CPG Advertisers

The ability to use data in out-of-home advertising is still relatively new.  Historically, OOH advertisers have relied exclusively on geographic and census-based demographic data.  More recently, location-based or “movement” data has been introduced, enabling marketers to target consumers based on their real-world behavior and measure campaign effectiveness in terms of place visitation. For example, we can measure whether an OOH campaign spurred a visit to a specific restaurant, retail, or any other location deemed an “offline conversion” — and even attribute conversion “credit” to the specific ad format, unit size, publisher, creative, audience segment, etc. in order to enable data-driven campaign optimization and improve outcomes over time.  

These have been significant advancements in OOH advertising.  But they haven't been sufficient for CPG advertisers, in particular.  After all, the average grocery store carries over 28k items. Just because a consumer visited a store in which a product is sold, that doesn’t mean they were likely to have actually purchased that specific product.  Tiffany Southwell, VP, Out of Home Media at Catalina, explains the problem succinctly: “These methods don’t work for CPG advertisers since the demographic data fails to identify actual consumer purchase preferences for specific brands. Meanwhile location-based foot traffic studies highlight when a consumer visited a grocery store but fail to inform whether a purchase of an advertised product is made.”

That’s why we at AdQuick are so excited about our new partnership with Catalina.  We love solving problems for our customers, and strive to make out-of-home advertising easy (this is, in fact, one of our company values).

Now, CPG marketers will have access to high-quality purchase data for precise targeting and true closed-loop measurement.  “OOH now sits at the intersection of technology and data-driven decision-making — and sales-lift measurement and addressable targeting are now key requirements for CPG brands to justify increasing their OOH ad spend,” explains Jim Wilson, CEO of Talon America. “The time is right for Catalina to expand its capabilities in OOH, which is an essential channel for CPG brands to optimize their marketing effectiveness at massive scale by capitalizing on real-time, purchase-based insights and targeting that drive in-store sales conversions.”

Importantly, this partnership yields bi-directional benefits. Catalina customers will now be able to leverage AdQuick’s industry-leading OOH advertising platform to execute targeted OOH campaigns.  And AdQuick customers benefit from the leading deterministic purchase data set sourced from over 440M shopper cards and covering more than 103M households.  “AdQuick has continually pushed to make OOH easier to buy and more measurable, said AdQuick CEO, Matthew O’Connor.  “Integrating Catalina's real-time purchase data and shopper ID graph further accelerates the granular targeting and robust measurement we offer to our clients.”

Now that we’ve walked through the “why”, let’s review the partnership — and its unique benefits – in more detail...

Enabling Granular Purchased-Based Audience Targeting

AdQuick and Catalina customers can now enjoy purchase-based audience targeting in their programmatic digital OOH campaigns.  Catalina’s large audience catalogue includes over 700 pre-built, syndicated segments spanning almost every imaginable purchase category. These audiences are based on granular shopper behavior, including category purchases, brand purchases and affinity, and value & deal-seeking behavior.  They also consider whether buyers are seeking out or avoiding specific ingredients, following lifestyle diets (from keto to vegan to kosher), and whether buyers tend to support social causes with their purchases.

So, if you’re looking to target buyers of semi-moist dog food who are earth-friendly and always seeking a bargain... we’ve got you covered.  Trying to reach denture adhesives buyers who prefer sugar-free gum? No problem.  How about targeting Paleo, frozen meal-starter buyers who avoid tree nuts and are striving to reduce their sodium intake? Check, check, and check. Catalina also provides custom audience segments, such as brand-specific buyers, lookalikes, and more.

All digital OOH ad inventory available in AdQuick DSP has been indexed to each of these audiences, making it easy for marketers to identify the specific ad units that are most likely to reach their exact target.  Additionally, this new purchased-based data is seamlessly integrated into our audience targeting interface, allowing advertisers to mix-and-match demographic, behavioral, and lifestyle segments to create the perfect audience. And AdQuick’s proprietary audience index filter provides unparalleled precision.

Providing Robust Purchased-Based Campaign Measurement & Insights

Over the past few years, AdQuick has introduced unprecedented measurability to the OOH space, including the ability to track both direct and indirect engagement spurred by OOH ads, attribute online and offline conversions, measure true ROI through rigorous lift analysis, compare relative performance by unit, and optimize campaigns to improve outcomes over time – all for both digital and static OOH media.

But to date, marketers have had to rely on in-store visitation as a proxy for offline sales. Though useful for many advertisers, like retailers and restaurants, this is especially problematic for CPG brands.

Now, thanks to our partnership with Catalina, CPG marketers will be able to measure the effectiveness of their OOH campaigns in terms of actual purchase behavior.  Catalina’s direct integrations with retailers provide a complete understanding of the shopper decision making process, and robust metrics on campaign performance. Reporting includes the number of unique households reached, the resulting sales value and units moved, responder trends both before and during the campaign, and more.

Additionally, Catalina’s robust data also provides insight into the behaviors of the buyers who were exposed to the OOH campaign, so that marketers not only know how many buyers converted, but also gain key insights about them.  Reporting includes:

• what % of converters were existing brand buyers,
• what % were new brand buyers,
• the competitive brands that new buyers have purchased previously,
• repeat purchase rates during the campaign,
• and the annualized value of projected repeat purchases, based on buyer behavior during the campaign.

In all, the combination of Catalina’s industry-leading purchase-based measurement and AdQuick’s existing OOH measurement and analytics solution, enables marketers to measure every step of the purchase cycle and every conversion channel – all within the convenience of a single product suite.

A Note On Data Quality

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: data quality matters. “Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) is a concept common to computer science and mathematics, but it applies to marketing data as well.  If you rely upon low-quality data, your campaigns will suffer.

With that said: Catalina audiences are best-in-class. They are built using 100% purchase-based behavior from Catalina’s network of 440M+ frequency shopper cards covering over 103M households, augmented with cross-channel purchase receipt & panel data from over 3M consumers, and then enhanced with demographics, store visit data, and product label data.  

The result is a granular and high-quality audience catalogue primed to deliver effective OOH campaigns.

Now is the time for CPG brands to embrace OOH

OOH is primed for stellar growth in the months and years ahead, as consumers return to the world and increasingly reject living their lives exclusively online.  Though the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t in the rear-view mirror quite yet, life has begun to return to normal.  One of the leading indicators of this is consumer mobility, which returned to its pre-pandemic levels across the country a few months ago.

Now is the right time for CPG marketers to fully embrace outdoor advertising.  According to Magna Global, OOH advertising overall is expected to grow by 10 percent in 2021 – the strongest growth of any offline medium. And thanks to Catalina’s granular point-of-sale data – coupled with AdQuick’s broad inventory, streamlined execution, and robust OOH analytics capabilities – CPG brands’ OOH efforts can be more measurable and data-led than ever before.