By Eric Hadley, Senior Vice President, Sales Strategy & Marketing, The Weather Company
Today is the first day of spring and I’m guessing you’re more than ready for it. This winter has been bad. No matter where you live in the U.S., you have experienced crazy weather. Crazy how cold it has been – Chicago had its third coldest winter on record; crazy how much snow there has been – NYC has had its fifth snowiest winter on record with 258% more snow than average for the city; and crazy how this is impacting your life. It doesn’t take a meteorologist to tell you that with warmer weather, it can only get better from here.
One of the biggest lessons of winter 2013-14 is that no matter what you do or where you live, weather affects your life. People may be tired of this “polar vortex,” but they sure aren’t tired of talking about it. Weather conversation used to be the “ice” breaker of awkward silences (what’s the first thing people say to each other in the elevator?) But no more – it’s the heart of the discussion, the lead news story, the thing everyone wants to know about.
Frankly, for The Weather Channel, the bad weather has been good for business. Record low temperatures have been growing audiences across all dayparts, with +8% increases during Daytime and +7% increases during Prime in Jan/Feb ‘14 – faster growth than all cable news networks. Our viewers want to know not only the ‘now’ and ‘today’ forecast, but also the future – the 5-day forecast, the 10-day forecast. Forecast page views in Jan/Feb ’14 on weather.com were up +21% compared to the same time period in 2013.
Businesses and marketers are watching for the same reasons. Just as volatile weather impacts your personal life and schedule, weather influences business, too. That’s why Barron’s magazine called The Weather Channel’s Paul Walsh “The meteorologist Wall Street needs to watch.” Paul knows that following the weather and connecting marketing to weather allows you to “Anticipate and Exploit” vs. “Cope and Avoid.” Across all categories – retail, CPG, QSR – no business it seems, is safe. For The Weather Channel, this presents an interesting conundrum: our partners ask, “When can we switch out our winter inventory? Or do we need to order MORE winter inventory?”
The answer is that because of this increasing unpredictability, we tell our clients to target their advertising based on changing weather conditions. We have sold a record number of “weather-triggered” packages to clients in the CPG, retail, automotive, QSR, insurance and financial service categories, across all platforms this year. Our recent investments in data and analytics provide greater insights for advertisers to improve their ROI. We have the ability to scale our unique capabilities from a small scatter buy to a full enterprise solution for any marketer, any season, summer, fall, winter or spring.
So now you have to ask yourself – is your business ready for spring? How can you leverage the season and this year’s particular traits to your advantage to reach viewers, digital users and consumers in general who can’t wait for warmer weather? There’s no time to wait to formulate your plan – warmer temps may be in your 5-day forecast. So with all this volatility, you need a weather strategy to maximize your marketing. Weather strategy connects your business to the weather.
To answer the original question, yes, spring will come. And when it comes, man, will it be great. What we have is a national case of cabin fever. People want to get out – and when they do, they’ll be out there in droves. We’re not worried about our ratings at TWC once temps start rising, though, because when clear skies prevail, we’ll keep viewers entertained with great original programming like “Prospectors” and “Strangest Weather on Earth.” So while it may be smart to watch the calendar for the first day of spring, it’s smarter to watch “AMHQ with Sam Champion” and our team of 200 meteorologists: they’re the best place to find out when spring will really come to you…
Eric Hadley is senior vice president of sales strategy and marketing for The Weather Company, spearheading B2B marketing and developing large-scale opportunities with premium advertisers. In this role, he is responsible for leading Weather’s sales strategy and marketing team, and elevating the company’s brand portfolio throughout the advertising community by leveraging the company’s ability to deliver cutting-edge, large-scale advertising and data-driven campaigns for marketers across The Weather Channel, weather.com, and The Weather Channel mobile and tablet platforms. Hadley brings to the role more than 20 years of experience in marketing leadership positions in consumer, media and technology companies.
