The Weather Company, IBM?s weather data and forecasting subsidiary, is collaborating with GlaxoSmithKline's Theraflu to bring a cold and flu tracker into the palms of consumers? hands.

Powered by online sickness crowdsourcing platform Sickweather, the Cold and Flu Tracker will provide updates to users on cold and flu activity in their area based on data churns in real time. The tracker is characteristic of the innovative data-driven approach that IBM is famous for, and marks a continuation of the direction it had intended to go with The Weather Company properties when it acquired the company in January.

?At a time when consumers are voluntarily putting up billions of data points a day about their interests, preferences, and other data signals about who they are, real-time trend analysis of that data can provide a powerful tool for quickly and inexpensively solving marketing challenges,? said Amit Avner, founder and CEO of Taykey.

?Data mining billions of conversations and engagements that flow through websites and social networks isn't supernatural. It?s simply a tool for predicting consumer trends that?s significantly faster than traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups.

?Quickly analyzing these signals can help deliver personalized and engaging experiences across industries.?

Data-driven healthcare
The tracker is available on all participating brands properties, including weather.com, Theraflu.com, and the Weather Channel app. It uses the self-reporting and crowdsourcing capabilities of the Sickweather platform in combination with the geographic reach and user base of The Weather Company?s properties to create a powerful, location-based hub for cold and flu awareness. 

Its user experience on The Weather Channel app is by and large analogous to similar trackers already hosted by The Weather Channel app, including a self-reporting inclement weather crowdsourcer in which users submit the weather in their area. The data is then tracked and organized by location to provide a representation of weather patterns in granular detail.

The Cold and Flu tracker works by using real time data provided by the Sickweather client to produce heat maps sickness activity. Some clients will also make use of current and historical CDC reports for context.

A strategic partnership
The Weather Company is introducing the Cold and Flu Tracker in collaboration with Theraflu to help launch the latter?s ExpressMax Caplets, its latest offering.

The collaboration includes a cold and flu sentiment trigger which will deploy targeted advertising based on data gleaned from weather conditions combined with local social conversations, retail extensions allowing brands to leverage location data to reach consumers in markets with cold and flu activity and off-property media activation for platforms outside of The Weather Company properties.

Another feature of the collaboration will be IBM?s proprietary Watson Ads platform, which allows consumers to interact with ads in real time and submit requests while receiving targeted ads based on weather patterns. Campbell?s Soup was the first brand to use the platform earlier this month (see story).

Mobile technology has been gaining significant ground in the weather sector, even offering assistance with brands leveraging digital platforms to help out those who were left in need by Hurricane Matthew (see story). 

?Luckily, programmatic media buying makes it possible to align display and video advertising with key trends automatically in real-time,? said Mr. Avner. 

?This partnership is one exciting example of the myriad of actionable real-time conversation data that can be mined from websites and social platforms.?