Datalogix’s acquisition Tuesday of shopper marketing and loyalty data company Spire indicates a growing trend around in-store marketing: blending traditional shopper-and-trade-marketing dollars with brand spend.
“[Traditionally], shopper decisions would be made specifically by the teams at P&G and Unilever or Kraft, who own those retailer relationships and have got a certain fixed allocation of shopper dollars,” Datalogix CEO Eric Roza told AdExchanger. “What we’re seeing happening, increasingly, is that bigger brand budgets are being put into answering, ‘How can I reach the right people and make this accountable to sales so it’s safe for me to move money to digital?’”
Spire specializes in shopper marketing, which is in-store marketing designed to drive spontaneous purchases. To power these initiatives, the company has its hands on loyalty card data, data around the point-of-sale purchase, and trade-level data (i.e., information around demand distributors use to determine how much of a product they should send to a store).
“These retailers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars reaching their consumers largely through freestanding inserts and newspapers and we know there’s going to be a more efficient way to reach those people [in store, and in the moment] where they spend their time right now,” he explained. “We’re trying to help them and the ad-tech landscape kind of discover each other.”
The ambitious, far-reaching initiative is around tightening the links between online data, first- and third-party data sets and trade-level information. It’s a goal that, among other things, requires a tremendous amount of technical know-how and integration. But Roza is hopeful. Once that happens, he said, “you get into a scenario where everybody wins.”
