Verizon Media reaches deal to use Catalina shopper data in programmatic digital buys

Verizon Media has reached a deal to bring individual shopper card data from Catalina into programmatic digital ad buys for packaged-goods marketers, giving it the first demand-side platform powered by offline and online sales data from Catalina’s 236 million shopper cards. The move comes as marketers prepare for the loss of cookies and other individual identifiers within Google’s Chrome browser. But the link with Catalina will provide copious online and offline purchase data that can be combined with Verizon Media IDs to target and evaluate digital campaigns in real time, says Verizon Chief Business Officer Ivan Markman. Purchase data like Catalina’s is also crucial in targeting so-called “moveable middle” consumers—persuadable folks who fall between loyalists and those who never buy a brand’s products. They’ve become the new media planning target in the MMA-backed Outcome-Based Marketing system. “Verizon Media has a very strong first-party identity graph that is tied to hundreds of millions of users and content that’s very rich, ranging from the likes of Yahoo! Sports to TechCrunch and finance,” Markman says. While he expects the Catalina-informed DSP to be used widely for ad placements within Verizon properties, he also says it can be used across many digital out-of-home, connected TV and unaffiliated media buys. Markman doesn’t believe loss of personal identifiers within Chrome will diminish usefulness of the Catalina partnership, and may actually make it more important. “We have Connect ID, which is our cookie identity solution,” he says. “We have first-party consent. We can connect to identifiers other than cookies. So if nothing else, I would say it’s a positive development, because this solution would be one of the survivors.”

Verizon Media reaches deal to use Catalina shopper data in programmatic digital buys

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