Highly effective advertising requires more than just the right message. Your ads also need to reach consumers at the right time and place for an ad to really speak to them.
Tailoring your marketing to the forecast can help you do just that, lending added context and relevance to your messaging. This concept of “contextual advertising” is a fundamental truth in digital advertising, and weather conditions increasingly are becoming the new frontier in fully leveraging that context. But you don’t have to take our word for it — just look at the success these five brands have had with weather responsive ads.
BMW: Bad Weather Equals Good Timing
A little over a year ago, BMW released a new video ad showcasing the xDrive system, the four-wheel-drive system found in some of its models. The company wanted to do a Facebook video ad campaign that highlighted the prowess of the xDrive system in poor weather and road conditions.
They wanted their ads to correspond with inclement weather, so they operationalized their video ads to trigger based on those conditions for locations around the world. The triggers took real-time weather data from the user’s location to pause and play the ads on Facebook. The results were incredible—they saw a 30-percent rise in engagement during snow and a 16:1 return on investment.
Molson: Tapping into Summer Cravings for a Cold One
Nothing beats a cold one on a summer day, and no one knows that better than Molson, the maker of Coors Light and Molson Canadian Cider. Molson decided to experiment with a weather-triggered digital advertising tool for these two products, both of which are marketed heavily in summer. The tool checked the forecast of eight cities in Canada every 15 minutes.
When the weather was above 74 degrees and sunny, the tool triggered Facebook ads that referenced the weather, such as “Summer heat? Simply say ‘cider.’” Both click-through and engagement rates were higher with the weather-related ads, and higher engagement rates with Facebook ads thus resulted in a lower cost-per-click.
TUI: Turning Rainy-Day Blues into Bookings
TUI — formerly Thomson Holidays — sought to drive more quality traffic to their website to boost vacation bookings. The company teamed up with a weather website to do a brand-takeover of the company’s desktop and mobile app.
When the weather in the user’s location was cold, rainy, cloudy, or snowy, they saw pictures of vacation destinations with sunny beaches and clear skies to entice them to book. So stellar were the results of this campaign that TUI reinvested 300 percent of that first campaign’s budget in future campaigns.
Burton: Boosting Conversions with Weather-Responsive Home Page
Clothing retailer Burton decided to add a weather-dependent tile to its home page that referenced the visitor’s local forecast. Next to the local weather reference were product recommendations based on those weather conditions. The campaign gave Burton an 11.6-percent increase in website conversions.
Pantene: Weather-Responsive Campaign to Stop Bad Hair Days
In an effort to revive declining sales, Pantene launched a campaign that focused on weather-related hair problems. Pantene partnered with The Weather Channel to run ads on pages predicting conditions, such as humidity, problematic for hair. The ads also included coupons and directions to the nearest store. The campaign boosted sales by an impressive 28 percent.
From beer to vacation bookings, weather-triggered ads can help sell just about anything. These brands are just a few that have discovered how valuable weather-informed advertising can be.
