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Marketers seeking better customer data sometimes tap into shopper intelligence firms like Catalina—a company that knows where most people in the U.S. spend their money. Now, Horizon Media is partnering with the firm to give its clients more insight into what consumers buy.
Catalina’s first direct agency partnership signals that media industry players—not just brand leaders—can weigh in on the kinds of data used to target consumers. It also shows that partnerships with intelligence firms can expand beyond a single campaign and benefit an agency’s entire client roster.
Catalina now integrates its data with Horizon‘s proprietary blu. marketing platform, strengthening the media agency’s targeting capabilities and benefits clients like Hershey’s.
“Horizon is our first agency that we have created a partnership with like this. And Hershey’s is obviously a big market leader in the CPG space. So to have a name like Hershey’s trust Catalina data for their source of truth was obviously a pretty big win for us,” Christine McGovern, vp of media and data solutions at Catalina, told Adweek.
The intelligence firm is a leader in the consumer insights space. Its joint venture with Nielsen, called NCSolutions, uses the pair’s combined data to produce market research and industry insights. Media experts are also familiar with the company, which offers audience segments to purchase on LiveRamp’s Data Marketplace.
SKU-level sales data
Catalina provides SKU-level sales data that is of particular value to CPG companies, which are eager to understand more about their customers’ purchasing habits. The company is known for creating the Checkout Coupon, the digital alternative to mass-reach coupons, and much of its data comes from individual transactions tied to loyalty card information.
The firm can leverage these insights, but it remains privacy compliant by avoiding tying them to an actual person’s name, home address, email address, phone number or social security number. Instead, Catalina pairs transactional data with an anonymized ID number. Marketers can still use information that helps them target better, like demographics, behaviors, interests and purchase patterns.
Catalina data provides that with shopping and behavioral insights on nearly all U.S. households, including data on consumer transactions.
“All of our retail partners send PII to Experian to authenticate those households, and then all their purchase data is connected at a Catalina household ID and associated to their frequent shopper cards or their loyalty cards. So we then can attach all of their purchase behavior back to that loyalty card and back to that household ID,” said McGovern.
Expanding Hershey’s data
Hershey’s awarded its media business to Horizon last year following a competitive review. The business includes the Reese’s, KitKat, Jolly Rancher, Twizzlers, Ice Breakers and Pay Day brands. The blu. platform impressed the brand and was a big reason Hershey’s chose Horizon.
“In conducting our media agency review last year, the strength and scope of each competitor’s data platform was a critical consideration. We were impressed then with Horizon blu. and are thrilled that Catalina has further fortified the blu. platform to provide an unmatched level of data to inform, accelerate and measure the effectiveness of our marketing efforts,” said Lynn Hemans, vp of consumer intelligence and analytics at The Hershey Company, in a statement.
Horizon has a proprietary identity graph—a database that consolidates information on 288 million individuals—within blu. A unique ID number represents each individual, preserving their privacy, and blu.’s identity graph ensures each blu.ID number corresponds with a real person and is not duplicative. That means an individual that sometimes goes by John Smith, J. Smith, or JS is counted as one person, instead of three. Without this tool, marketers have trouble crafting a cohesive targeting strategy. According to Laura McElhinney, Horizon’s evp and chief data officer, Catalina and Horizon data have high match rates.
The partnership provides Hershey’s with even more data that it will use to amplify marketing strategy for its non-confectionary brands.
“We did have a little bit of a hole in regards to their entire portfolio, and that’s really what brought us to Catalina,” said McElhinney.
