How the weather is set to flood adland with opportunities

It is hard to think of country more obsessed with the weather than Britain, but UK marketers need to do more to exploit the impact the local climate has on consumers, according to industry experts.

Speaking at an event hosted by The Weather Channel (TWC) last week, Anthony Mullen, a senior analyst at Forrester, said that the weather “directly effects our purchasing and buying behaviours”, with exposure to sunlight levels even determining our willingness to pay more.

However, it’s time for UK brands to “knuckle down,” Mullen says – particularly now we have such sophisticated real-time and location-based data with which to exploit local environmental changes – something that provides a “genuine context” for serving an ad.

So have UK advertisers been missing a trick?

Mullen says it’s huge in the US – and across the channel, French fashion retailer La Redoute is often cited as the perfect example of a brand successfully using real time weather data.

With signage linked to various sensors, including a barometer and thermometer, the billboards can serve an ad based on the environmental context of the person viewing it. Woolly hats for cold days; bikinis for sunny, warm ones.

It sounds incredibly simple, but it has taken time for the technology to mature enough to use data in such a sophisticated and meaningful way.

Now, taking the same principles behind the La Redoute campaign to mobile, the idea is helping marketers over here deliver real-time, dynamically served ‘native’ ads – helping to banish the banner ads of yesteryear to the dustbin and start serving something with more relevance, context and creativity in-app.

Take The Weather Channel’s ‘adapter ads’ for instance. Using some of the 20 terabits of data TWC gathers each day, the company has been serving ‘native’ ads within its forecasting app since 2012 – with different elements of a campaign served depending on the outlook.

The company had a great deal of success last winter with a campaign for Quaker Oats which saw one ad served if it was particularly cold, and another if it was warmer.

TWC has seen a surprising variety of brands embrace this type of contextual ad, from Continental Tyres promoting products for different road conditions, to Despicable Me 2 having different characters from the film “own” different weathers.

“We found it genuinely very difficult to find a brand category where weather didn’t matter,” Lindsay Wiles, strategic sales director at The Weather Channel, told Newsline. And it’s a clear improvement on the banner ad, she argues.

“The Quaker Oats campaign saw purchasing intent go up 6.5%,” says Wiles, when asked about the effectiveness of the campaign. “But more than that, the association between weather [types] and the product came out the strongest at 13.5%”

Likewise, with Despicable Me 2’s ‘branded backgrounds’ in the weather app, the average click-through-rate (CTR) was double the industry average.

Globally, TWC has seen its app downloaded 126 million times, with 3.5 million in the UK. That starts to pale in comparison to the BBC’s own – entirely ad free – weather app which announced this week that in just eight months it has been downloaded more than five million times.

Yet consumers, in their willing millions, are still choosing to engage with ads that offer more context.

“Banner ads, creatively, are the lowest common denominator in terms of creative solutions,” Wiles says. “It didn’t take long for them to become commoditised, but a couple of years ago there was a push from publishers to create more interesting and engaging ads.”

‘Generation N’ was born, Wiles says. “Now we’re looking at native ads […] that mean more to the consumer.”

With weather updates delivered to TWC’s app every 15 minutes, the adapter ad format is delivering “the right message at the right time” Wiles adds. “The beauty is that the climate in the UK changes so much, the user could potentially experience all of the creative in just one day.”

In future TWC plans to add more weather categories and ‘product triggers’ to the apps, as well as looking to take the technology outdoors to deliver something more like the La Redoute campaign.

Likewise, the success of the project means there are now plans to take the tech to brand websites to build weather triggers into third-party pages. It means particular products or services could be promoted to ensure they match a potential buyer’s outlook as they plan against the weather forecast.