Weather Company’s data now available to any advertiser through LiveRamp

The Weather Company is going big with weather.

The IBM-owned firm has announced a partnership with Acxiom-owned data management platform (DMP) LiveRamp, which is the first use of The Weather Company’s weather data for targeting ads outside of its website.

“We’re going to become an ad product factory, distributed through LiveRamp,” VP of Global Automated Monetization Jeremy Hlavacek told me. “It’s a big shift for The Weather Company.”

The partnership also marks the first time that LiveRamp, which specializes in creating audience segments from online and offline data, is making available a layer of live event-based and frequently updated data, like weather.

The Weather Company service, called WeatherFX and built over the last four years, updates via API every 15 minutes, while LiveRamp had traditionally updated every 30 days.

Hlavacek said that the first ad product will be targeting data for display ads, with social and other ad-targeted offerings on the roadmap.

He added that WeatherFX is more than simply raw weather data, offering a catalog of 500 triggers that define pre-built relationships between weather, location and sales of a given product category or specific product.

A trigger, for instance, might quantify the effect of hot weather in New York City on bottled water sales, compared to similar weather in, say, Los Angeles. It might also determine the specific effect on a product, like Dasani bottled water. Here’s a graphic of the process from The Weather Company:

In one use case cited by The Weather Company, an unnamed auto manufacturer increased Twitter activity by 125 percent by scheduling promoted posts touting its vehicles’ performance in bad weather, during actual bad weather in given locations.

Another example: A quick-serve restaurant in Atlanta boosted foot traffic after a WeatherFX trigger showed that coffee sales jump when there is lower humidity in that town.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.