Leveraging Weather Woes for Better Targeted Advertising
Business growth is directly related to understanding your consumer behavior and buying pattern better, which unlocks a number of potential buyers for the business. A study done by British Retail Consortium (BRC) says the weather is the second biggest influencing factor on consumer behavior after the state of the economy. The weather has an influence on what clothes we wear, what we eat, where we go, and what we buy. Some of the businesses, on which weather has a direct impact are — Clothing, FMCG, Pharma, F&B, Travel and Tourism and Electronics (HVAC). A 15-degree Celsius increase in temperature over a week increases the sale of air conditioners and suncare products by 24% and 11% respectively, whereas a 15-degree Celsius decrease in temperature over a week sees a 15% increase in the sale of portable heaters.
One of the studies conducted at Yale University found out that if the temperature was reduced to 33 from 37-degree Celsius, it would result in the decrease of the immune system and allow cold-causing viruses to replicate more. Example — A pharmaceutical client was keen on reaching users with cold and flu medicine ads. They wanted to reach out to users who were most likely to purchase cold and flu medicines. The team undertook the premise that drop in temperatures could be a major cause for humans falling sick and suffering from cold and flu, as the first step towards solving the client’s business challenge.
MiQ collaborated with third-party weather data providers and with help of API calls we gathered real-time weather data for the cities where the client wanted to run the pharma campaign. Based on past weather information for each of the cities and with the help of an internal study, we determined the minimum temperature (minimum benchmark) below which users were most likely to catch a cold or flu. The temperature benchmark became our trigger point to run the campaign. When the temperature of a region went below its benchmark, we activated or showed ads but if the temperature was above the benchmark, we deactivate the campaign and stopped serving ads. In this way, we were able to target regions and reach potential users who would purchase cold and flu medicines.
Another use case where we were able to use weather data was in the generation of insights for campaigns that were active for a while. This type of insight has been useful to see a correlation between business and weather. For a Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) client, we saw a negative correlation of 0.33 between the sale of the product and weather, which clearly states that as the temperature falls, users are 33% more likely to purchase the product.
How do we ingest weather data and what kinds of weather data do we have?
MiQ collaborates with World Weather Online as the third party for weather data. The service gives us two types of feeds — current and forecast feed. Hourly API is a call made for current feed data, which is also stored in our database and later used as past weather feed. Forecast feed is updated on a daily basis. The weather data that we get is granular and at the city level. Apart from temperature data, which we use for both activation and insight purposes at MiQ, we use other weather features like weather type, humidity, cloud cover, and visibility etc., to activate the campaign or find correlation and give insights. For example, when it rains, we can show rain apparels ads and when it’s windy weather, we can trigger ads for food delivery services as most consumers would prefer to stay at home during that period.
At MiQ, we also integrate weather with other products such as DCO (dynamic creative optimization). In this, we dynamically change the creative message based on weather conditions. For example, if we have an e-commerce website that sells apparels, we integrate weather feed with the creative metric in such as way that if it’s cold, we show ads with apparel preferred in cold climates such as jackets and if weather is warmer then the creative is customized to show apparels suited for a sunny climate. By using weather in our creative messaging, the impact on audiences is greater, leading to more conversion on such creatives.
Display advertising is becoming one of the keys ways to reach customers and the integration of weather information in ads helps advertisers look at the bigger picture and connect the dots. Brands that plan their sale according to weather conditions and market their products based on it are winners in the long run.
