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).

The acquisition by Datalogix, whose solutions are designed to connect online activity with offline sales, could present deeper data opportunity for Spire’s clients. Currently, Spire works with about 24 regional retailers and grocers. The problem, Roza said, is that regional grocers have yet to scratch the surface on digital yet, despite their access to a wide range of purchase-based information.

“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.”