Catalina’s Audience-First Approach to Responsive Marketing and Best-In-Class CPG Attribution Measurement Solution

The last time I was on stage to accept an award was probably in high school. There are surprisingly few moments in life that offer actual trophies, so I’m going to take a moment to bask in the glow of a recent win at the 2022 AdExchanger Awards. I had the honor of accepting the “Best Data-Driven Television campaign” award on behalf of the Catalina, Cadent, and Applegate teams.

While the look on my face when they announced our campaign betrayed my happy surprise, I am excited to share what made this campaign award worthy. The unique offering Catalina put together is still new. We were able to not only trigger an in-store printed coupon only if a consumer had seen a TV ad multiple times, but also suppress that print if a shopper had already purchased the item and offer them a bounce-back offer instead. This Responsive Marketing solution involving Sequential and Suppression techniques has been used by retailers with significant online capabilities but, until now, it hasn’t been easy for CPG marketers to tap into this technology.

Lest you ask, “What sorcery is this?” during this spooky season, let me offer insight into the ingredients of how it all comes together:

The Audiences

If you’ve ever used Catalina for in-store coupons, you know that our targeting is spot on. We’re not guessing what interests shoppers based on “market signals” or store visits; no, we’ve got the inside scoop into whether you’re buying one single-serve bag of chips because you needed a snack or are buying five family-sized bags a month. Don’t worry, we may know what you buy, but we’re not judging. Plus, all you are to us isa string of random numbers, and we do everything in a privacy-compliant way.

Brands bring us their objectives, then because Catalina understands shopping behavior, we provide the right audiences. In the case of Applegate’s campaign, they wanted to efficiently attract new triers to its diverse portfolio of natural and organic meats, re-engage lapsed buyers, and encourage cross-category purchases spanning the company’s growing family of brands. We knew how to do all of that because we understand what people are buying - and when.

The Graphs

The real magic in how we link TV to in-store coupons comes from the combined Catalina and Cadent ID graphs. Cadent’s Aperture Viewer graph houses more than four billion (billion with a “B!”) match keys across zip codes, emails, IP addresses, and more. Catalina is the OG in building and deploying purchase-based data, and when we match our real-time shopper insights to Cadent’s 250MM active TV device IDs and 300MM home IP addresses, we reach 100MM+ U.S. households. Our joint ID graphs have a 99% household match rate: This means our clients can take action based on shopping behavior that used to be available only to owned retail sites.

The Pixel and Responsive Marketing

We have a special pixel (some have literally called it “the magic pixel”) that can trigger actions between different media types. It allows us to see and count impressions and purchases and then take custom actions based on those signals. (See? Magic!!)

We embed this pixel with other pixels and tags in the TV creative being served, and we see purchase data in real-time. So shoppers exposed to three CTV ads who did not purchase an item received an incentive to try Applegate’s new items via Catalina’s in-store print media network. Those who had already purchased Applegate items had that offer suppressed and received a “stock-up” incentive instead.

We call this “Responsive Marketing”. You may have seen other names for it, but it all centers on the idea that you can react to what your consumer is doing. In the CPG space, there have traditionally been so few opportunities to capture purchase behaviors and apply them in real-time to data-driven digital campaign. Now, Catalina’s solutions can help clients apply this capability in an omni-channel fashion to drive incredible results.

The HUB360 Platform

You may be thinking to yourself this is all fantastic, but how do I know in the end that these tactics all worked? I’m glad you asked. Catalina’s HUB360 platform creates access to one of the fastest, most granular attribution measurement solutions for the CPG industry. With it, we were not only able to measure results – an impressive 25% sales lift and 42% increase in dollars* spent by existing Applegate buyers – but also optimize the creative after only a few weeks on air. We found that one piece of creative was performing better than the other, so we pushed more impressions toward that spot. We even could tell that a few audiences were performing better than others so we were able to direct slightly more impressions to improve overall Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Oh, by the way, this was all on a campaign that targeted only the 4.2MM bulls-eye households that were designated by Applegate. Super precise, super-efficient, super results.

All in all, I would say that all these things combined are worthy of a little gold statue. I invite all of you to come up with ideas on how you can leverage the ingredients above to create your own award-winning campaign-- or at least achieve some wicked results for your brand.

*SOURCE: Catalina's proprietary HUB360 Platform: Digital + In-Store HH Offers (excludes In-Store Transactional)

Pictured from left to right: Jessica Lan - Catalina’s VP OmniChannel Media Solutions, Stacey Hawes – Catalina’s Chief Revenue Officer, Andrew Horlick – Cadent’s VP Advertising Solutions, and Jes Santoro – Cadent’s EVP Advanced TV and Video