Company Name: Catalina
Author of the post: Adam Van Beck, SVP of Omni-Channel Solutions
Tenure With Current Company: 12 years
Years of Industry Experience: 20+ years

Give us a brief history of your company, when and how did you get started and what is your high-level mission statement?

Our story began in 1983 when five marketing visionaries went boating off the coast of California’s Catalina Island. They conceived a groundbreaking idea – to create the world’s first in-lane personalized marketing channel. Their aim was to use innovative digital technology to provide shoppers with highly personalized offers and incentives at the point of purchase.

While our methods and capabilities have expanded greatly over the years, Catalina’s mission remains the same: To understand and influence consumer behavior, transforming shoppers into buyers and buyers into loyal fans. Retailers, brands, and agencies continue to rely on us to deliver personalized ads at precisely the right moment by helping them optimize every stage of planning, execution, and measurement.

What would you like CMA and SIMA members to know about your brand/company?

At Catalina, our data scientists leverage the most advanced predictive modeling techniques and ethical AI to drive growth for the world’s leading CPG brands, retailers, and agencies.

Our proprietary BUYERScience platform synthesizes a rich, real-time blend of granular, purchase-based data and shopper insights into nearly all U.S. households. This deep understanding of what motivates buyers allows us to identify a brand’s most valuable audiences using AI-enhanced, customizable audience segments.

We then engage and activate shoppers through precisely orchestrated, highly personalized, omnichannel messages and offers -- both in-store and across digital, TV, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Our ability to measure success is invaluable; we track the responsiveness and sales impact across channels in real time, enabling in-flight adjustments and optimizing media spend for our customers.

Our flexible omni-media solutions, powered by our BUYERScience ID Graph, accelerate your growth nationally and at key accounts by providing:
AI-powered Audiences & Personalization

Unified Cross-Channel Reach
Optimized Message Frequency
In-flight & Post Campaign Sales Measurement

To learn more about Catalina’s points of difference, visit Why Catalina or contact us at results@catalina.com. For tangible results our omnichannel solutions have achieved for CPG brands, retailers, and agencies, explore our Success Stories.

What is the most common question you hear from current and potential customers, and how do you answer it?

Our clients consistently ask: “How can you help us regain lost shoppers, increase basket size, and find buyers for new products in new markets?”

Our answer lies in Catalina BUYERScience. Regardless of the marketing channel or tactic, our differentiation is rooted in a deep understanding of shopper behavior, powered by advanced data science. We determine the optimal media to influence each purchase decision for the right consumer – driving meaningful results across the path to purchase.

As clients increasingly focus on real-time performance, Catalina’s access to point-of-sale data from our retail partners enables us to optimize campaigns in-flight, adjusting based on actual consumer response. This real-time adaptability improves both the shopper experience and ROI on ad spend.

Additionally, brands expect clear, measurable insights into performance. We deliver this through our closed-loop measurement capabilities, providing visibility into sales lift and return on ad spend (ROAS), and identifying the best-performing combinations of audience, media, and creative.

Catalina UNLIMITED complements these capabilities by removing the constraints of our traditional retail network. It empowers brands to expand where and to whom they tell their story. With Catalina UNLIMITED, we determine the right targeting, activation, and measurement strategies – beyond our in-store footprint. This means brands can activate campaigns in new environments, reaching new audiences with the same level of precision and accountability they’ve come to expect from Catalina.

Any white space in the industry or areas you are looking to expand into?

To fuel growth for our retail, brand, and agency partners, we are continuously advancing our predictive modeling techniques and ethical AI. Catalina’s Responsive Marketing Solutions uncover real-time insights that help brands and retailers acquire new consumers, maximize the spend of loyal customers, and retain shoppers who show signs of churn. We deliver personalized messages that blend digital and non-digital channels into seamlessly integrated campaigns, using sequential marketing, retargeting, and audience suppression to respond in-flight to shopper behavior. Learn more about our Responsive Marketing offerings here.

Beyond that, we’re expanding our Shopper Marketing capabilities to drive engagement and reach unique shoppers at the regional, local, and even store level. Our investments in CTV will help clients drive awareness, reach, and sales, making advanced TV truly measurable.

We also see tremendous growth opportunities in extending our ability to measure shopper behavior across all major retail categories, including Big Box Home Centers and Member Club Stores to Convenience Stores, Pet and Beauty Superstores, and Specialty Retailers. Across all these areas, Catalina delivers an array of innovative, channel-agnostic options that activate shoppers along the path to purchase. Want to learn more about Catalina’s Responsive Marketing offerings? You’ll find more information here.

What is the most important thing that needs to be addressed in the category management and shopper insights disciplines going forward?

CPG Retailers and Brands continue to face disruption to their P&Ls from sticky inflation, which is also affecting consumer behavior across all retail formats. The reduction in SNAP benefits is compounding the bottom-line impact. In these market conditions, customers are actively seeking meaningful value whether they’re shopping in-store or online.

It has become critically important to provide shoppers with the right offers and incentives at precisely the moment they need them– in a privacy-compliant manner – to build loyalty and grow baskets.

At Catalina, we deliver precision marketing at scale. While our data scientists have been leveraging artificial intelligence for years, our performance solutions and predictive models are increasingly using AI to build highly efficient audiences. This allows us to target customers with unparalleled accuracy, whether a brand’s goal is to acquire new shoppers, re-engage lapsed ones, or enhance relationships with loyal customers.

AI also powers our ability to activate personalized media across unified channels, optimize campaigns in-flight based on real-time insights, and measure return on ad sales (ROAS). For our CPG customers, we provide a clear picture of what, where, and why shoppers buy, enabling real-time omnichannel activation at every point across the purchase funnel. For our retail clients, we help maximize their marketing dollars to deliver total incremental sales and growth in key categories. In fact, our average redemption rate is 5.3%, which is significantly higher than the competition.

How are you thinking about the next 3-5 years in retail?

We’ll continue to deepen our investment in machine learning and AI to drive campaign performance for our clients. By combining our 1:1 deterministic data with the richest real-time data sets, we will give our customers a deep reservoir of insights to measurably impact shopping behavior, both in-store and online.

Protecting an individual shopper’s right to privacy will remain a top priority. Our in-store network uses anonymized shopper IDs to provide real-time insights and power the predictive models that help us develop effective in-store shopper programs, all in a privacy-compliant manner.

It will be essential for retailers to design and implement strategies that address the “digital divide.” Relying on digital-only solutions misses a significant share of shoppers – over 100 million adults, who either prefer printed coupons or lack access. By combining digital offers with 1:1, in-store, in-lane media solutions, retailers can give all shoppers equal access to value. By meeting customers on their own terms, retailers can help them stretch their dollars further and earn their lasting loyalty.