Weather Channel aims to be “principal weather provider in the UK”
The Weather Channel is hoping to increase its brand awareness in the UK by offering advertisers what it claims are the first ever location-based digital ads that adapt depending on the weather.
The company hopes to increase its exposure in the UK by offering brands the new ads – dubbed AdAptor ads – on its own website, and later its third-party weather feeds on sites such as Yahoo!.
The Weather Channel is also bringing over its forecasting technology from the US to provide more accurate and up-to-date weather reports.
Ross Webster, managing director of sales at the Weather Channel, says: “Our ambition is to become the principal weather provider in the UK and become our own brand rather than a third party weather feed.”
He adds that the Weather Channel has “better technology” than the Met Office and that the BBC, which has its own popular online weather service, cannot offer engagement to advertisers.
In the UK the Weather Channel is a principally online and mobile brand that serves about 2.2 million users, Webster claims. In the US, the Weather Channel’s weather.com is the twenty-sixth most visited website, according to Alexa, with 60% of its users accessing it via their mobiles.
More than 60 brands in the US use the Weather Channel’s adaptable adverts regularly, including Mini, General Motors and Budweiser.
Retailer LL Bean in the US uses the service to advertise particular types of clothes dependant on temperature, whilst travel companies have used AdAptor ads to tempt consumers abroad on a cold, rainy day.
The Weather Channel claims its AdAptor adverts offer 127% greater click through rates than the average performance of other marketing on Weather.com, according to Open AdStream analysis from 2009.
