Catalina Partners with FanAI as Live Event Marketing Sponsorships Rebound

CPG Marketers Now Have Access to Deeper Data, Analytics & Measurement Capabilities to Underscore Positive Impact of Sponsorship Investments on Sales

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., June 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Shopper intelligence leader Catalina is partnering with FanAI, whose data platforms provide insights into the power of sponsorships for some of the biggest brands in sports and entertainment, to help CPG brands better understand—and measure—how their sponsorship investments directly drive sales for their products.   

With sponsorship investments again on the rise following pandemic-induced restrictions and cancellations of many live events over the past two years, Catalina's real-time purchase insights and highly scaled US shopper household graph are enabling FanAI to provide CPG brands with multi-channel brand sponsorship and sales lift measurement analyses to justify the return on their investments (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS).

"Leading brands once considered sports sponsorship to be more of a brand awareness tactic in their marketing arsenal, but with the advent of smart, multi-channel, connected digital devices, TVs and content, brands can now link sponsorship and consumer engagement to offline purchase activity, loyalty and incremental sales," said Brian Dunphy, SVP of Strategic Partnerships at Catalina. "We're excited that FanAI will leverage Catalina's data insights to help CPG brands get the most out of their sponsorship investments. Together, we can provide these brands with in-market sales strategies and execution throughout the marketing mix funnel to drive incremental sales or maximize sales in sluggish markets."

Added John Abreu, Director of Partnerships at FanAI: "CPG brands play a major role in sports sponsorship today, but such investments need to do more than enhance visibility. Integrating data from Catalina on CPG purchases will enhance our ability to provide brands and agencies with a more holistic and granular look into how their sponsorship dollars are performing and how they can be optimized to drive sales and revenue growth."

• Benchmark sales ROI across a brand's portfolio to identify both strong and weak markets for a sponsorship, helping to inform the renewal value as well as decisions on where to allocate activation spend
• Provide insights into the distribution of customers and spend to support goals of acquisition, retention, and/or increased basket size
• Provide insights into the success of a specific activation or advertising, providing real-time snapshots of what drives the most sales
• By connecting audience insights from ticket sales, digital behavior and television and streaming viewing exposure, with anonymized shopper purchase data, marketers can connect real transactions to real audiences to better drive sales and garner an accurate view into the ROI delivered by their sports sponsorship investments.

Proving ROI and sales lift are critically important for sponsorship rights holders to remain a significant line item on a brand's marketing budget.

The proliferation of digital platforms sports fans can now access to consume content presents both an opportunity for increasingly customized brand partnerships as well as new challenges with respect to cross-channel measurement. CPG brands will require data-driven insights and granular cross-channel measurement to validate their investments. This opens up opportunities for sponsorship rights holders who can further segment their sponsorship offerings to entice new CPG marketers to sponsor channels that are most relevant to their consumers.

"Expect closer cooperation between rights holders and sponsors going forward, with data-driven digital fan engagement more crucial than ever. Both sides want to gather as much data as possible to measure brand engagement and evaluate key metrics like brand awareness, purchase intent and leads generated. Moreover, they will be able to target specific customer groups both demographically and/or geographically, reaching their audience in a more effective way and seeing how successful their campaigns are. That's a remarkable measure I like to call 'Return on Sponsorship'," said Catalina's Dunphy.

Catalina is a leader in shopper intelligence and highly targeted in-store, TV, radio and digital media that personalizes the shopper journey. Powered by the world's richest real-time shopper database, Catalina helps retailers, CPG brands and agencies optimize every stage of media planning, execution and measurement to deliver $6.1 billion in consumer value annually. Catalina has no higher priority than ensuring the privacy and security of the data entrusted to the company and maintaining consumer trust. Catalina has operations in the United States, Costa Rica, Europe and Japan. To learn more, please visit www.catalina.com or follow us on Twitter @Catalina.

FanAI enables marketers to connect real transactions to real audiences for an accurate view into ROI, through the combining of audience data, such as ticket sales, social data and television and streaming viewing exposure, with customer purchase data. FanAI also provides media channel segmentation for a view into where fans are watching target sports events and which fans are spending. Marketers can gain a view into competitor sports sponsorship ROI and compare sponsorships by team to estimate potential effectiveness of their buys. FanAI matches exposure data against customer purchase data for ROI analysis.  Brands can also integrate their own first party sales data into the platform. The analysis enables brands to align their marketing strategy regarding sports sponsorships against business objectives, optimize performance and monetize activation for increased sales. For more information, visit www.fan.ai.

SOURCE Catalina