Infillion Acquires Catalina, Pulling $600 Billion in Purchase Data Behind Its Walled Garden

Infillion, the adtech company built almost entirely through acquisitions, just made its most consequential deal yet. The company announced on February 23 that it has acquired Catalina, one of the world's largest sources of deterministic purchase data, covering roughly $600 billion in annual consumer spending. Terms were not disclosed.

If you're a CPG marketer, a performance marketing manager running retail media campaigns, or anyone trying to connect ad exposure to actual purchases, this deal changes the playing field. Catalina's data, historically available to multiple platforms, is heading behind Infillion's walls.

And that shift tells you everything about where adtech is going in 2026.

Catalina's roots go back to physical cash registers. The company built its data business by capturing transaction-level purchase data directly from point-of-sale systems, supplemented by data licensing agreements for online sales and loyalty program information. For decades, Catalina was the gold standard for understanding what consumers actually bought, not what they clicked on, not what they viewed, but what they carried out of the store.

The company was perhaps best known for its former joint venture with Nielsen, the one-time Nielsen Catalina Solutions (now part of shopper data giant Circana). That partnership provided the CPG industry's benchmark for connecting advertising exposure to purchase behavior.

Infillion COO Brian Kaminsky told AdExchanger that the acquisition creates a "force multiplier" by bringing Catalina's purchase intelligence into Infillion's existing platform. The company already operates a sprawling collection of acquired adtech assets, including the MediaMath DSP, CTV ad tech TrueX, location data companies Gimbal and Fysical, OOH platform InStadium, the Drawbridge cross-device network, and UberMedia managed service technology.

That's a lot of pieces. Catalina is the piece that connects advertising delivery to real-world purchase outcomes.

Here's the part of the press release that should make you uncomfortable if you rely on Catalina data through another platform. Kaminsky confirmed that while there will be a transition period, the long-term plan is to make Catalina data exclusively available through the Infillion platform. Not as a standalone data business. Not licensed to outside ad platforms.

Exclusively inside Infillion's walls.

This follows a pattern. SPINS acquired MikMak last month to connect its retail purchase data set directly to ad targeting and activation. Retailers themselves have been leading this change by building retail media networks that monetize their own first-party purchase data. The logic of separating measurement data from execution platforms, which once seemed obvious, has collapsed.

"Far from being a line that's crossed, this is more enabling business strategies that they've already adopted," Kaminsky said, referring to how retailers have already embraced connecting their data to media businesses.

The skeptical take: Infillion is building what it calls a walled garden alternative to the actual walled gardens. Kaminsky said the company will be able to "produce a level of insight and reporting and reliability that looks remarkably like the walled gardens, only it would be without the walls." But if the data is exclusively available inside one platform, how exactly is that "without the walls"? The walls are just newer.

This acquisition doesn't happen in a vacuum. Retail media is projected to reach $100 billion globally by 2027, according to eMarketer estimates. Every major retailer, Walmart, Amazon, Target, Kroger, has built or is building an advertising business powered by their purchase data.

For CPG brands, the challenge isn't access to retail media. It's measurement across retail media. When you're running campaigns on Walmart Connect, Amazon Ads, Kroger Precision Marketing, and three other retail media networks simultaneously, each platform grades its own homework. Cross-platform attribution is functionally broken.

Infillion's pitch is that Catalina's deterministic data, drawn from cash registers and loyalty programs across multiple retailers, provides an independent measurement layer. Buy media anywhere, measure the purchase impact through Catalina's data. The problem with that pitch going forward is that "independent" becomes questionable when the measurement company is owned by one of the media platforms.

If you're a performance marketing manager at a CPG brand or a data scientist building measurement models, here's what changes.

First, Catalina data availability will narrow. If you were licensing Catalina data through a third-party analytics platform or DSP, plan for that access to eventually disappear. Start evaluating alternatives now, not when the transition period ends.

Second, Infillion becomes a serious contender for your media budget. The combination of a DSP, cross-device identity, CTV capabilities, location data, and now deterministic purchase attribution creates a genuinely differentiated offering. The platform can plan, target, deliver, and measure campaigns with purchase-level outcomes, all without leaving the ecosystem. That's compelling even if you're skeptical about the consolidation approach.

Third, the pressure on independent measurement increases. If Catalina's data goes behind Infillion's walls, the market for truly independent purchase-based attribution shrinks. Circana, NCSolutions, and Attain become more important as alternative sources of purchase data for cross-platform measurement.

Infillion's acquisition strategy invites a legitimate question: can a company built from a dozen acquired point solutions actually deliver a cohesive platform experience? The list of acquisitions is long. MediaMath, TrueX, Gimbal, Fysical, InStadium, Drawbridge, UberMedia, and now Catalina. Each came with its own technology stack, data formats, and integration requirements.

Building a "composable advertising platform" from acquired parts is a fundamentally different engineering challenge than building one from scratch. The history of adtech is littered with companies that acquired their way to a full stack and then spent years trying to make the pieces actually work together.

Infillion's success will depend on whether the sum of these parts creates genuine workflow advantages for buyers, or whether it just creates a bigger, more confusing platform with a lot of legacy code under the hood.

The transition timeline matters enormously. If Infillion moves quickly to restrict Catalina data access, it forces a rapid reevaluation across the CPG and retail advertising ecosystem. If the transition is slow and gradual, competitors have time to build or acquire alternative data sources.

Watch for reaction from the major holding companies. If Publicis, WPP, or Omnicom, which buy enormous amounts of CPG media, push back on the data exclusivity plan, Infillion might need to maintain some level of open access. The leverage dynamics between platforms and agency holding companies will shape how this plays out.

The biggest question is whether this deal accelerates the fragmentation of purchase-based measurement. In a world where every platform owns its own purchase data, the dream of unified, cross-platform, independent attribution gets harder. For CMOs already struggling to justify budget to their CFO, that's not just an academic problem. It's the difference between being able to prove your marketing works and hoping your board believes you when you say it does.

One number that deserves more attention than it's getting: Catalina covers $600 billion in annual consumer spending. That's roughly 8% of total U.S. consumer expenditures. Whoever controls that data doesn't just measure advertising. They shape how billions of dollars in media budgets get allocated.

Look at the pattern across the last 12 months. SPINS acquired MikMak. Infillion acquired Catalina. Retailers built walled gardens around their own transaction data. Each move pulls deterministic purchase data closer to the media execution layer and further from independent availability.

For the marketing analyst building media mix models, this consolidation creates a practical problem. Your MMM's accuracy depends on having access to multiple independent data sources that can validate each other. When each data source gets locked inside a different platform, cross-validation becomes harder and your model's confidence intervals widen. The $300,000-plus annual cost of running in-house MMM doesn't go down when your data inputs get fragmented. It goes up.

For the RevOps manager trying to connect content and social activity to pipeline, Catalina's move inside Infillion is a reminder that data availability can change overnight based on corporate strategy. Any measurement framework that depends on a single vendor's data is inherently fragile. Building redundancy into your measurement stack isn't paranoia. It's risk management.

The CMO trying to justify marketing spend to the CFO faces the most direct impact. Closed-loop attribution sounds great in a sales pitch. But when the platform selling you media is also the platform measuring whether that media worked, the CFO's skepticism is warranted. Independent measurement isn't just a nice-to-have. For board-level credibility, it's essential.