IBM?s The Weather Company is making another data-driven move to permeate the marketing landscape in expanding off-property access to its proprietary automated ad targeting platform WEATHERfx.

Through partnerships with The Trade Desk, elf-service technology platform for buyers of advertising, and Vistar Media, a programmatic out-of-home advertising platform, marketers will be able to leverage WEATHERfx targeting across a variety of programmatic campaigns. Both programmatic and digital OOH advertising are promising growth markets, with programmatic ad spending expected to grow at double-digit rates for the next several years, and digital placements forecasted to account for more than half of OOH ad spending by 2018.

?Leveraging real-time data for hyper-local messaging has become a key component for marketers and our proprietary WEATHERfx targeting platform has been at the forefront of that trend for years,? said Jeremy Steinberg, global head of sales at The Weather Company. ?More and more, marketers are seeing the benefits of layering localized weather data with other data sets to help improve ad targeting and messaging. 

The Weather Company?s WEATHERfx property is an automated targeting platform that helps power more informed marketing decisions by leveraging weather's potential impact on emotion and delivering messaging designed to inform consumer action. Using weather-based triggers that identify conditions when weather is most likely to drive consumer behavior, the automated WEATHERfx platform eliminates media waste and activates a brand's media to run when the optimal mix of conditions occur.

The decision to expand the platform is in keeping with IBM and The Weather Company?s larger purported goals, which have been to convince marketers that weather is an essential part of a holistic marketing strategy.

In October, The Weather Company continued its foray into weather integration in advertising with a partnership with Theraflu to create a Cold and Flu tracker powered by online sickness crowdsourcing platform Sickweather to provide updates to users on cold and flu activity in their area based on data churns in real time (see story). 

?Since marketers will be able to apply WEATHERfx to a larger portion of their marketing and media, consumers will benefit by seeing more relevant advertisements at the right time and place,? Mr. Steinberg said. ?The WEATHERfx platform analyzes complex data to provide marketers with actionable insights into consumer behavior, and in turn, consumers will receive ads for products when they are more likely to want or need it based on local weather conditions.?

Not to be outdone, The Weather channel is contributing to the climate crowdsourcing craze to create a content application to create a hub for real-time weather content across the United States, powered by Snapwise Inc., and its uCiC app which allows users to see any place in the world at the present moment through requests from other app users in that location using videos, photos and instant messaging (see story). 

?Weather is a universal driver of human behavior, determining how consumers behave and what they choose to buy,? Mr. Steinberg said. ?It?s an important data layer that all marketers should consider in their campaigns.?

Having access to predictive weather analytics from WEATHERfx helps marketers pinpoint the optimal mix of weather conditions that will have an impact on consumer behavior and product sales, where the message will most likely resonate, when that optimal mix of weather conditions occur, and what creative to run,? he said.??And now with this further expansion of the WEATHERfx platform, marketers can now leverage WEATHERfx decisioning outside of Weather?s properties and can extend this dynamic targeting based on weather insights across various channels and platforms as part of their advertising strategy. 

?Eventually, we hope WEATHERfx can help influence all aspects of a marketer?s digital advertising strategy.?