Catalina Partners with PlaceIQ to Connect Omnichannel with OOH

A new partnership between the shopper intelligence provider Catalina and the data provider PlaceIQ could have a major impact on the way multi-location brands run optimized OOH campaigns in the coming years.

With this new arrangement in place, Catalina clients will be able to leverage PlaceIQ’s data in real-time to inform planning, audience targeting, measurement, and analytics for digital campaigns. Catalina will use PlaceIQ’s Firehose Visits product to enhance its measurement, audience creation, and analytics offerings. Catalina will now be able to map anonymously up to 110 million shopper households that link to over 2 billion device IDs. PlaceIQ plans to extend its Point of Interest (POI) database to include more than 30,000 locations in a bid to support Catalina’s growing out-of-home (OOH) and place-based media service.

The partnership is one of a number of deals inked by Catalina in the past 12 months. On Monday, the company announced a deal with Blockgraph, the technology company owned by Charter Communications and Comcast NBCUniversal, to deliver enhanced targeting and measurement capabilities across Convergent TV. 

Senior Vice President of Digital Business and Strategic Partnerships Brian Dunphy says working with outside location data partners allows Catalina to leverage anonymous location data as an additional signal to understand shopper interests and preferences as well as how media exposure can lead to offline purchases. 

“One of the driving impetuses for this partnership [with PlaceIQ] was our expansion into out-of-home advertising to enable better targeting and measurement capabilities for CPG advertisers who were looking to connect OOH advertising with other cross-channel ad campaigns,” Dunphy says.

PlaceIQ has been busy forming its own partnerships in the past year. In October, the company announced an expansion of its partnership with 605, a company that specializes in television and cross-platform attribution. In 2020, PlaceIQ bought fellow location data company Freckle IoT in a bid to become a market leader in the attribution space. This new deal with Catalina signals that PlaceIQ plans to put greater focus on OOH in 2022, even as the company continues to expand into other channels.

PlaceIQ Vice President of Partner Development Brian Bradtke says this partnership will take his company’s offering further into the CPG marketplace, creating more access and greater usability for brands and channel partners. 

The deal allows Catalina to map location-based visit signals to its anonymous shopper ID graph, with PlaceIQ providing more knowledge of where consumers shop and what they care about. Dunphy says he’s eager to see how the companies can work together to help CPG advertisers better target shoppers with relevant advertising at the locations they frequent while also measuring sales lift conversion based on shoppers seeing specific ads on the path-to-purchase.

“There are a few driving industry factors that make this partnership timely,” Dunphy says. “The increase in OOH-DOOH advertising spend by brands and agencies, particularly in the CPG space, and the need to provide measurable return-on-ad-spend … The OOH industry saw a resurgence in spend in 2021 compared to the prior year, and DOOH is up nearly 80% over the prior year.”

Dunphy says demand for better measurement and efficacy of OOH by CPG advertisers is a factor behind Catalina’s decision to seek out additional location partners. The company’s enhanced ability to map anonymous location data signals to likely media exposure on OOH and DOOH assets with real-time offline purchase data, enabled through PlaceIQ, provides unprecedented measurement and targeting capabilities at scale.

“We see a big opportunity in OOH-DOOH channels for CPG advertisers,” Dunphy says. “Brand advertisers are looking to link cross-channel advertising with better targeting and cross-channel measurement, as well as to optimize based on purchase signals by either increasing or decreasing media impressions across channels based on offline activity.”

​​Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.