Dive Brief:
- Last October, IBM acquired all of The Weather Company’s digital and data assets looking toward a future day when it would turn that asset into solutions for advertisers. That day has come with IBM now merging the acquisition with Watson, according to Ad Exchanger.
- Putting The Weather Company’s data together with Watson’s computing power gives IBM’s marketing cloud users a powerful tool for personalized marketing based on hyper-local weather forecasts.
- At IBM's Amplify event, Harriet Green, vp and gm of IoT and commerce for IBM, said, “We’re the second largest location services company now in the world. Weather affects people’s mood and how much they’re willing to pay.”
Dive Insight:
The name of the game in data-driven marketing is specialized datasets. Be they Spotify’s look into artist and music preferences of its users; Facebook’s deep understanding of its users’ behaviors across its entire social graph, platform and app ecosystem; or even Google’s stranglehold on data around search, browsing, email, and beyond -- the more granular the insights they can provide on users, the more useful and appealing for marketers looking to better tailor their tactics to target audiences.
In The Weather Company’s case, the value is in marketers wanting to create personalized messaging. One way to do so is to send marketing communications based around the weather happening to the recipient as it is happening. For example, if a retailer knows a major snow storm is in the forecast, it can send a promotional message with a discount for snow-related products only to people who fall under the forecast area.
Combining this data with Watson allows the IBM Marketing Cloud to provide highly segmented predictive analytics for personalized campaigns.
