Masters of Marketing Spotlight Series

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

Dan AlexanderCO-FOUNDER / CHIEF METEOROLOGIST & DATA SCIENTISTWEATHERALPHA

Carl WeberDIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTWEATHERALPHA

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

Dan Alexander, co-founder and chief meteorologist, and Carl Weber, director of business development at WeatherAlpha, the company offering customized weather targeting solutions across the digital eco-system, discuss the extent to which weather influences customer behavior and why marketers need to integrate weather into their strategies and tactics.

Dan distills the science of weather into applicable solutions that marketers of all sophistication levels can understand. Carl bridges the client prospecting gap between idea and necessity — helping establish WeatherAlpha as one of the most critical and measurable solutions in a company’s marketing strategy. Since its founding in 2010, WeatherAlpha has worked across a wide and varying set of indust-ries, including CPG, pharma, home improvement, and apparel, citing client success with the likes of Kingsford, GoPro, and Lowe’s.

Dan Alexander

Carl Weber

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We believe that weather permeates and impacts almost everything in our lives. At WeatherAlpha, our focus has been on delivering industry-specific solutions for companies seeking to understand the impact of weather on their business in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Targeting and augmenting messaging around weather seems fairly obvious, right? Coffee and mittens sell when it’s cold and dreary, frozen yogurt and a new backyard grill are top-of-mind when it’s hot. The impact of weather has always been top-of-mind to marketers, but the capability to leverage weather data effectively within the digital space is a relatively recent development.

Today, marketers have access to thousands of data touchpoints at any given moment. The ability to align this data with the complex science of meteorology allows marketers to capitalize on how weather affects customer behavior and make more meaningful con-nections during their campaigns.

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

“Weather targeting is an obvious fit for many industries, and I am continually impressed by the novel ways marketers look to leverage our data.” – Carl Weber

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We have found that marketers’ understanding of weather varies greatly. Some companies have built robust data models where the rules governing favorable weather are highly specific and localized. When working with such clients, we take these precise instruc-tions and leverage our robust platform to apply them within the digital ecosystem.

For other clients, the collaboration begins at a much more basic level. We start with a deep analysis called a Weather Impact Assessment that determines the impact of weather on their bottom line. This removes any guesswork for marketers and allows us to pinpoint critical weather conditions — either at a national level or regionally — and apply them to their marketing campaigns.

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

“We want to be a programmatic weather-based solution provider built upon the wealth of data and insights we’ve accumulated. Our most successful campaigns start by quantifying the impact of weather on the product or service, implementing the insights in a campaign, and continually optimizing the tactics based on performance and weather pattern.”

– Dan Alexander

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

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“Aligning content with weather offers multiple layers for increasing relevance. A recent Stanford University study analyzed several billion social

media posts and confirmed the impact of weather on mood. Warm, sunny days were associated with positive sentiment while precipitation and extreme temperatures had a negative impact. Simply put, weather is a significant factor in our emotions and serves as a powerful call to action within any creative

to augment a weather-targeted campaign.”

– Dan Alexander

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Snow is one weather condition with massive consequences for brands — both favorable and unfavorable. It is also highly infrequent in most places. So, if we find that snowfall is highly correlated with increased sales of a product, we will obviously recommend targeting when snow is falling. But that presents a few challenges. First, snow is rather rare — the average snowstorm lasts 12-18 hours. Second, consumers are typically hunkered down and not in a position to make a purchase. Rather than restricting a campaign to targeting falling snow, we suggest leveraging past and forecast snowfall to increase scale, extend the snow event to several days, and capture weather-driven demand.

The relevance of content is also important as we think regionally and locally. The United States is far too vast to set a campaign to run using a fixed temperature threshold. For example, a 55 degree day in the springtime in Miami means something totally different to Bostonians enjoying the same temperature after the winter thaw. Similarly, setting a campaign target for 80 degrees or higher yields little to no variance in Las Vegas from April to October. We spend a lot of time educating our clients about how to use weather data for improved campaign frequency, relevance, and flexibility given the dynamic and regional nature of weather.

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

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As a startup, we are especially diligent about the companies we choose to partner with in the advertising technology space. A critical need for us as we have grown is to elevate beyond the basic geo-targeting approaches to weather data analysis and apply more complex data sets to truly understand how weather is impacting the online and offline habits of our clients’ target audiences. By pairing WeatherAlpha data with identity-based behavioral and dem-ographic data, we are able to bring our performance metricsfull circle in completely new ways.

For example, identity can help us work with our clients to evaluate not only that barbecue grills are popular in the northeast as temperatures begin to rise in the early spring, but also that the customers making a new grill purchase are married and live in a particular section of the suburbs close to a certain home improvement retailer. The application of identity data is helping us answer more of our clients’ questions, evolve the tracking of offline conversations, and analyze actual purchase data against specific weather conditions within each region.

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

“The ability to work with identity-based data puts us closer to being a comprehensive targeting solution for all of our clients operating in the digital ecosystem.” – Carl Weber

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Unlike most targetable data points available to marketers, weather impacts all people but is constantly changing. It influences what we wear, how we feel, and how we plan to spend our time. We view our role as a consultative partner with marketers as our paramount responsibility, and will continue to grow without compromising our commitment to accuracy, transparency, and objectivity.

Weather will always be an extremely dynamic and at times chaotic system, but we are focused on bringing scientific advancements into our platform and enhancing the down-stream experience for our clients. We look forward to being a part of the conversation with marketers to create new solutions that influence clients at every available touchpoint.

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

“Weather is not just a marketing consideration. It’s a bottom line truth. U.S. economist experts believe that between 25 and 45 percent of the country’s gross domestic product is affected by weather.”– Carl Weber

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

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“Today, it’s hard to keep track of the available data sets within the digital advertising

ecosystem — but there is also tremendous opportunity to experiment with various tactics, combine data sets, and answer

questions rooted in science with statistically significant sample sizes. Our vision when we founded the company was that the impacts

of weather on business would extend to advertising. That leap of faith is paying off.”

– Dan Alexander

Masters of Marketing Spotlight SeriesDan Alexander, Co-Founder / Chief Meteorologist & Data Scientist, WeatherAlphaCarl Weber, Director, Business Development, WeatherAlpha

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