Leading shopper intelligence and omni-channel media provider Catalina is launching a new portfolio of services and products today under the “Catalina Compass” banner that is focused on enabling retailers’ own data monetization and media revenue growth.
Retailers of all sizes are wrestling with the challenges of scaling their Retail Media Networks, which collectively are expected to generate up to $100 billion in revenue over the next few years (source: eMarketer). To guide retailers over those hurdles, Catalina Compass will help retailers accelerate incremental revenue generated through their media network, starting with quantifying the impact of brand advertising investments in their on- & off-platform channels.
Catalina Compass is innately built to flex and scale to each retailer’s unique needs and puts the retailer in the driver seat to utilize each facet of the portfolio. It leverages Catalina’s decades of expertise building customer engagement with CPG brands through precise targeting, shopper activations orchestrated across multiple channels, and seamless, real-time measurement.
An important differentiator is that Catalina Compass incorporates the company’s responsive media capabilities that intelligently deploy media on- and off-platform, including the in-lane channel, to drive shopper conversion with the most efficient media possible, thus providing a positive ROI for the advertised brand.
“The point of Catalina Compass is to help each individual retail partner more quickly achieve their new revenue goals through collaboration and products. By bringing together a powerful set of products and services, along with our vast experience at unlocking the value of a retailer’s 1st party data and media channels — including their in-store media assets — Compass helps navigate the rapidly evolving AdTech and MarTech arenas,” said Kevin Hunter, Chief Commercial Officer at Catalina. “Catalina Compass will help with the fundamentals of selling and executing multi-channel campaigns, orchestrate more meaningful customer experiences via hyper-personalized content, as well as solve the more complicated aspect of in-flight measurement and attribution, on and off platform. Our new, open architecture approach will quickly give retailers added scale to their on-platform media through our ecosystem of industry leading partners so that they won’t have to navigate each on their own.”
Added Hunter, “We speak from experience. In many respects, Catalina established an early Retail Media Network when we took the groundbreaking step of creating the in-lane media channel with retailers back in 1983. Since that time, we have helped our retailer partners generate billions of dollars in sales, investments in retail account-specific programs, drive customer acquisition, and monetize their data. We have been one of the longest-trusted partners of retailers’ 1st party data in the industry. We also know from decades of working with CPG manufacturers and agencies that brand activation investment is driven by high-quality measurement and insights to clearly show the ROI of the media. That is why we have built granular measurement capabilities into the nucleus of Catalina Compass.”
In recent years, Catalina has created a wide range of digital products and solutions built upon a foundation of precision targeting and in-flight media measurement. A key aspect of the company’s innovation investment was to link the in-store media channel to a retailer’s on-platform and off-platform digital channels to provide a seamless customer experience and deliver highly personalized content and offers to shoppers. With Compass, retailers can leverage Catalina’s innovation to grow their scale of monetized activation with expanded reach into channels such as advanced TV, digital out of home and digital audio.
While Catalina has been helping retailers monetize their data for over the past decade, Compass will escalate the immediate value to retailers by providing access into Catalina’s Data Science Center of Excellence. Compass’ data solutions enable retailers to more quickly generate insights, identify new monetization opportunities, and sell performance-designed custom audiences. Catalina’s data scientists have been refining advanced personalization and optimization tools for retailers across circular content, personalized promotions and growing their private label revenue. These tools can now help drive a more seamless, engaging and efficient customer experience across all channels of their media networks.
While it’s based upon the retailer’s 1st party data, Compass also takes advantage of Catalina’s proprietary shopper behavior products that help illustrate the “why behind the buy.” Retailers can now take advantage of Catalina’s unmatched shopper behavioral insights and ID Graph that maps household identifiers to digital devices, powered by an open ecosystem of strategic third-party data partnerships including LiveRamp, Cadent TV, Verizon Media (now Yahoo), iHeart Media, and Starlite Media, among others.
“The pandemic provided retailers with an unprecedented number of shoppers utilizing their digital ecosystems, giving them a new, scaled universe of digitally engaged shoppers. This created greater urgency to address those shopper needs while creating new revenue streams,” said Hunter. “Retailers today require agile, flexible, trusted partners to help them monetize their assets. In the process of building Catalina Compass, we recognized an opportunity to evolve our business to enable the strategies of our retail partners. Catalina Compass is fundamentally a portfolio of Catalina’s best products and talent, optimized for the retailer’s use, with closed loop measurement and transparency at the core.”
