Google Experts See Growth Potential In Weather Advertising

UK marketers can utilise the extremely unpredictable nature of the country’s weather to deliver targeted strategies to consumers, industry leaders announced at Weather for Breakfast, a marketing event held in London this week.

According to Tom Jenen, head of marketplace engagement at Google, weather data can be extremely powerful, but its effect can be maximised when it’s analysed next to marketers’ own data. The key is to collect data to find more about your customers and then bind it to the weather, he said, as quoted by The Drum.

Senior analyst for Forrester Research, Anthony Mullen, another participant in the event, illustrated the potential for weather to improve marketing campaigns by sharing information about the approach taken by French fashion house La Redoute. The fashion retailer used out-of-home signage, tied to barometric gauges and temperature sensors, to change billboards according to the current weather. The campaign delivered a 34% surge in traffic and a 17% increase in sales, he said.

Both Mullen and Jenen agreed that brands need to research their sensitivity to weather first, before embarking on weather-based campaigns, in order to make sure they create an effective impact on consumers.

Terry Makewell, head of Digital and Global Media at the Met Office, was also positive that this is an area with strong growth potential, predicting that 2014 would be the year of weather advertising. The Met Office’s mobile app has been downloaded more than nine million times and it was now on more than one in two iPhones in the UK.